Fifth Element Star Milla Jovovich Reveals AI Memory Tool MemPalace
The Fifth Element and Resident Evil star reveals an AI project inspired by the ancient “memory palace” method.
By Jason NelsonEdited by Guillermo JimenezApr 7, 2026Apr 7, 20263 min read
In brief
- Actress Milla Jovovich says she helped build an AI knowledge tool called MemPalace, inspired by the ancient memory palace mnemonic technique.
- The system organizes documents in virtual rooms instead of relying on keyword searches.
- Jovovich designed the concept while Bitcoin lending head Ben Sigman engineered the system, according to an Instagram post.
Not content with battling aliens and zombie hordes, Milla Jovovich, the actress best known for roles in The Fifth Element and the Resident Evil franchise, has shifted her focus to artificial intelligence.
In a video posted to Instagram on Monday, Jovovich said she spent months developing the AI knowledge tool MemPalace while working on a separate, unnamed gaming project, after encountering problems with how existing AI systems store and retrieve information.
“But during the process, I stumbled upon a bunch of problems that I knew needed to be solved if I was ever going to get it finished,” Jovovich said in the video.
According to Jovovich, those challenges led to the creation of MemPalace, an open-source system available on GitHub that she describes as a new method for AI memory, storage, and retrieval. Jovovich said she designed the concept and architecture behind the system, while coder and CEO of Bitcoin lending platform Libre Labs, Ben Sigman, engineered the software.
Mempalace doing well so far - 10k stars on GitHub and 50 PRs in 24 hours! pic.twitter.com/WUGOftFVBo
— Ben Sigman (@bensig) April 7, 2026
“By day, she’s filming action movies, walking Miu Miu fashion shows, and being a mom. By night she’s coding,” Sigman wrote on X, teasing there is “more to come.”
MemPalace draws inspiration from a mnemonic technique that dates back to ancient Greece.
Known as the memory palace, or the “method of loci,” the strategy involves associating pieces of information with specific locations inside an imagined building or environment. By mentally moving through that space, a person can retrieve the information tied to each location.
Jovovich said she became interested in the concept while researching how memory experts store and recall information.
AI developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, have added memory features that let their AI assistants retain user preferences and past context across conversations. According to Sigman in a separate post, instead of sending data to a background agent in the cloud, Mempalace mines conversations locally and organizes them into a palace.
Sean Ren, a USC professor of computer science and CEO of Sahara AI, said MemPalace can be understood as a different way of structuring how AI systems store information. Because the system functions as a general method for organizing information, Ren said it could potentially work across AI frameworks.
“This seems to be a general approach, so scaling it does not seem to be a problem,” he said. “It could work with different agent systems.”
Still, Ren cautioned that claims about improved performance have not yet been validated outside controlled tests.
“That’s not proven,” he said, noting that early results appear to rely on benchmark experiments that may not fully reflect real-world deployments. “We need to wait to see how the community reacts when deploying it in real systems.”
Jovovich said Anthropic’s Claude helped shape the project after Sigman introduced her to the developer tool.
“I immediately realized that as an artist who loves to write, Claude could turn my words and ideas into reality,” she said, but emphasized that the experience reinforced her view that human creativity still drives meaningful breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.
“AI only knows what's already been done,” Jovovich said. “It's the humans running it that actually create something unique and different.”
The project is currently open source, and Jovovich encouraged developers to download the code, test the system, and offer feedback.
“That's the only way we can correct mistakes and truly keep improving the way we store our information,” she said.
