From Aliens to AI: Milla Jovovich's MemPalace Bags 10K GitHub Stars Faster Than You Can Say 'Leeloo'

Milla Jovovich, the actress best known for battling aliens in The Fifth Element and zombie hordes in Resident Evil, has pivoted to artificial intelligence. In a video posted to Instagram on Monday, Jovovich revealed she spent months developing an AI knowledge tool called MemPalace while working on a separate, unnamed gaming project, after running into problems with how existing AI systems store and retrieve information. Because apparently, even Leeloo needs better data retrieval than what current LLMs offer.

"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. The struggle is real, even for someone who's survived both alien invasions and the undead.

Those challenges led to MemPalace, an open-source system available on GitHub that she describes as a new method for AI memory, storage, and retrieval. Jovovich designed the concept and architecture, while coder and CEO of Bitcoin lending platform Libre Labs, Ben Sigman, engineered the software. That's right—Hollywood met Bitcoin Twitter, and somehow produced actual code instead of just NFTs.

The project exploded—10,000 stars on GitHub and 50 pull requests in just 24 hours. For context, most projects would kill for those numbers in a month. MemPalace did it faster than you can say "multipass."

"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." This is the kind of side quest that makes the rest of us look bad.

MemPalace draws inspiration from a mnemonic technique dating 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. Ancient Greeks were basically the original degens—just with better memory techniques and fewer JPEG collections.

Jovovich 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. Finally, AI can remember what you told it last Tuesday without the cognitive dissonance of a goldfish.

According to Sigman, 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. Think of it as Marie Kondo for your AI's context window—everything has a place, and everything fits.

"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 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." In crypto Twitter terms: nice launch, but show us the mainnet usage.

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 the experience reinforced her view that human creativity still drives meaningful breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. A take so based it could power a small nation.

"AI only knows what's already been done," Jovovich said. "It's the humans running it that actually create something unique and different." Burn. Someone tell the prompt engineers.

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. The open-source king is dead, long live the open-source queen.