Addresses #875. The previous README was 755 lines mixing six purposes
(scam alert, hero, two mea-culpa notes, install guide, architecture
explainer, API reference, file map). Rework it as a pure entry point:
what MemPalace is, how to install, honest benchmark numbers, links to
the website for concept/architecture documentation.
Key content changes:
- Drop the "highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked" framing.
- New tagline: "Local-first AI memory. Verbatim storage, pluggable
backend, 96.6% R@5 raw on LongMemEval — zero API calls." Avoids
naming a specific vector-store implementation since the backend is
pluggable (see mempalace/backends/base.py).
- Remove the cross-system comparison table. Retrieval recall (R@5)
and end-to-end QA accuracy are different metrics and are not
comparable; placing MemPalace's R@5 next to competitor QA accuracy
under a single column header was a category error.
- The "100%" LongMemEval headline is no longer the lead. The honest
held-out figure is 98.4% R@5 on 450 unseen questions. The rerank
pipeline reaches >=99% with any capable LLM (reproduced with
Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and minimax-m2.7 via Ollama) — pipeline-level,
not model-specific.
- Benchmark reproduction commands now reference the correct repo
(MemPalace/mempalace, not the defunct aya-thekeeper/mempal branch).
New file: docs/HISTORY.md as the canonical home for post-launch
corrections, public notices, and retractions. Contains verbatim:
- 2026-04-14 note on this rewrite (links to #875)
- 2026-04-11 impostor-domain notice (moved from README header)
- 2026-04-07 "A Note from Milla & Ben" (moved from README body)
README keeps a one-line scam-alert callout that links to
docs/HISTORY.md for the full timeline.
Igor Lins e Silva