Milla Jovovich has become a vibe coder! Or not?

The actress allegedly created a “memory palace” for artificial intelligence. The project is being promoted as a breakthrough, but there are many questions about it

Ben Sigman, director of Los Angeles-based crypto startup Libre, announced the creation of MemPalace, a tool that allows artificial intelligence to remember past conversations with the user.

MemPalace is based on the mnemonic “memory palace” technique, known since ancient times. Its essence lies in the fact that a person creates a certain space in his imagination - for example, a palace - and places in it the information that he needs to remember. To reproduce these memories, he goes on a “walk” through the corridors and halls of the palace.

Sigman said MemPalace outperforms all similar tools on the market. He presented his project as memory for AI, which is neatly organized using the proven “memory palace” method, is located directly on the user’s computer, does not require subscriptions to external services, and shows excellent results in performance tests.

However, the loudest was the statement that model and actress Milla Jovovich, star of the science fiction action film “The Fifth Element” and the “Resident Evil” franchise, based on the video game series of the same name, had a hand in MemPalace. Sigman put Jovovich's name at the very top of his post on social network X (“My friend Milla Jovovich and I spent several months creating MemPalace”), which has already received 2.8 million views since April 6.

Some commentators questioned whether Jovovich was truly involved with MemPalace. The actress herself dispelled these doubts. She stated that she was working on some “big game project” and encountered problems, an attempt to solve which led to the creation of MemPalace. Jovovich described herself as the architect of MemPalace and Sigman as the engineer, emphasizing that he was her longtime friend and “one of the best developers in the industry.”

What else did the actress say?

“The idea for MemPalace came to me when, after several months of very careful systematization, I realized that AI is simply not very good at finding the right things. All existing tools still force him to search by keywords. <…> I came up with the idea of ​​dividing the large [memory] space into rooms. <…> It took me months, but in the end it was worth it. I was able to create the architecture, and Ben brought it to mind, and our MemPalace came to life,” Jovovich added .

Jovovich's name attracted the attention of the media, who began to write that the actress had become a vibe coder (MemPalace can be called the result of vibe coding , since it was created using the Claude AI model).

The MemPalace repository on GitHub was also posted on behalf of the actress - and gained 23 thousand stars in a few days. GitHub users who reviewed it praised several of the project's original ideas, most notably the metaphor of organizing memory as a physical space that is intuitive to humans. But at the same time, numerous discrepancies were noticed between the stated and actual functionality of MemPalace. Almost all of the benefits that Sigman boasted in his X post turned out to be either exaggerated or simply false.

“Open source projects that use similar architecture and have similar performance metrics typically receive only a few stars in the first week. The variable that accounted for the difference in engagement was not development. The development is interesting in some respects, but in most respects it does not stand out as anything special. The variable is the name of the celebrity in the GitHub account and in the post about the launch of the project,” the creators of the startup Penfield, which also develops memory systems for AI, wrote in a blog on Substack.

Penfield also noted that the MemPalace repository on GitHub—unlike Sigman’s post in X—honestly reveals the project’s weaknesses. “Perhaps the most important plot in this story is the gap between what is written in the repository and what is presented in the marketing. And the famous name is the reason why anyone even heard of MemPalace,” Penfield sums up.

What Jovovich's role is in the project is not entirely clear. It is indicated on GitHub that the project’s repository was posted by the actress, but there are doubts about this. Most of the changes to the project were not made by her either. Although Jovovich herself calls herself the architect (essentially the author of the idea) of MemPalace, it is only reliably confirmed that she became its face. In the past, Jovovich has appeared in commercials for a variety of products, from Tonus juices to the video game World of Tanks .