GENOME

Open memory for AI agents. Same answer accuracy as Mem0 — but ~1,000× cheaper to store, runs fully offline, and keeps an auditable record.

Most agent-memory tools (like Mem0) call an LLM on every message to decide what to remember. That's the slow, expensive part — and GENOME's bet is that you don't need it. GENOME just embeds each message locally: no LLM, no API, no network in the write path.

Benchmarked honestly on public datasets (LoCoMo, LongMemEval), GENOME answers just as accurately as Mem0 — while storing memories for a tiny fraction of the cost and running completely offline.

Honest up front: on answer accuracy, GENOME ties Mem0 — we do not claim to beat it there (two independent benchmark runs confirm parity). The advantage is cost, speed, offline operation, and a temporal/auditable record Mem0 can't produce.

Don't believe it? Prove it yourself

The cost, speed, and offline claims need no API key — measure them on your machine in 60 seconds:

git clone https://github.com/NORTHTEKDevs/genome && cd genome
pip install -e . && python -m genome.verify

It writes memories with your outbound network physically blocked and prints a live pass/fail receipt — 0 network calls, 0 LLM calls, single-digit-ms writes, retrieval that works:

  [PASS] Air-gapped write path: wrote 200 memories with every outbound socket blocked -> 0 network attempts, 0 LLM calls
  [PASS] Write latency: 7.1 ms/message  (Mem0's measured write path: ~2,055 ms + 1 LLM call/message)
  [PASS] Retrieval works: top hit score 0.598

That receipt covers the cost/speed/offline story only. The accuracy-parity with Mem0 claim is a separate, larger check that needs an LLM key — reproduce it head-to-head on the same questions with your own key via python benchmarks/head_to_head.py (one OpenRouter key works; see benchmarks/RESULTS.md for the n=90 / n=205 runs, the paired significance tests, and the published nulls). The full test suite runs in public CI (badge above). The pitch isn't "trust me" — it's "run it."

Add persistent memory to your agent in one line (MCP)

GENOME ships a fully-local MCP server — cross-session memory for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor with no API key and no data leaving your machine:

pip install "genome-memory[mcp]"

{ "mcpServers": { "genome": { "command": "genome-mcp" } } }

Or zero-install via uv: { "command": "uvx", "args": ["--from", "genome-memory[mcp]", "genome-mcp"] }

Tools the agent gets: remember, recall, forget, reset_memories. Memories persist locally in ~/.genome/memories.db. Full MCP details ↓

GENOME vs Mem0 at a glance

	GENOME	Mem0
Answer accuracy (LoCoMo, LongMemEval)	tied	tied
LLM calls to store one message	0	1+
Write speed	~10 ms	~2,000 ms
Runs offline / air-gapped	yes	no (needs an LLM API)
Ingest cost (10k-user deployment)	~$190 / yr	$159k–$1.6M / yr
"What was true in March?" (point-in-time)	yes	no
Deterministic, auditable memory	yes	no

Every number is measured within one harness — same responder, judge, embedder, and top-k; only the memory layer changes — with paired significance tests. Full detail and per-number provenance: benchmarks/RESULTS.md. Formatted report: benchmarks/GENOME-LoCoMo-Report.pdf.

Why it's ~1,000× cheaper: it never calls an LLM to remember

Storing one message costs one LLM call in Mem0, zero in GENOME (just a local embedding). That's not a benchmark you can argue with — it's arithmetic, and it holds no matter which LLM you price it against. At 10,000 users × 50 messages/day (15M messages/month):

Model Mem0 uses to extract	Mem0's yearly ingest bill	GENOME
Claude Haiku	$1,601,757	$190
gpt-4o-mini	$238,596	$190
cheapest hosted model	$159,064	$190

The gap survives the cheapest model and grows in production (Mem0 re-sends stored memories to the LLM as the store fills). Reproduce: python benchmarks/tco_project.py (no API key).

It runs air-gapped

GENOME's default embedder is local. We proved the write path is genuinely offline by blocking all network during writes — they still succeed:

• ~10 ms/message, 0 network calls, 0 LLM calls (python benchmarks/local_writepath.py)
• Mem0 can't do this — it needs an LLM API call to ingest.

That makes GENOME usable on-prem, in regulated environments, or fully offline. It's a yes/no capability, not a price point.

How it works

• Write: embed the message locally and store it. No LLM, no network. (~10 ms)
• Read: vector search over your memories, with an optional local cross-encoder reranker for harder queries.
• Optional bi-temporal layer: track how facts change over time and answer "what was true at time T" — see below.

Install

pip install genome-memory

The default embedder is local (sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2) — no API key, works offline; the first run downloads the ~90 MB model once. OpenAI embeddings are optional for higher-dimensional retrieval.

Dependency footprint, honestly: the core install is numpy, sentence-transformers, scikit-learn, and rank-bm25. Local embeddings run on PyTorch (pulled in by sentence-transformers), so it isn't a tiny install — that's the deliberate tradeoff for offline, zero-cost embedding. Plotting/benchmark-chart deps live in an optional [viz] extra, not the core. Migrating from Mem0? See docs/migrating_from_mem0.md.

Quickstart (fully local, no API key)

from genome import Memory

mem = Memory(storage="genome.db")   # local embedder by default; ":memory:" for ephemeral

# Store a message -- embedded locally, no LLM call, no network
mem.add("Ada met Lin at the robotics summit in Berlin.", user_id="u1")
mem.add("They are collaborating on an open-source planning library.", user_id="u1")

# Retrieve the most relevant memories
for hit in mem.search("Where did Ada meet Lin?", user_id="u1", limit=5):
    print(f"{hit.score:.3f}  {hit.content}")

Memory mirrors Mem0's API (add / search / get / delete / reset) — a near drop-in swap. To use OpenAI embeddings instead (set OPENAI_API_KEY):

from genome import Memory, EmbeddingProvider
mem = Memory(storage="genome.db",
             embedding_provider=EmbeddingProvider(model_name="openai:text-embedding-3-small"))

Use it as an MCP server (fully-local memory for any agent)

GENOME ships an MCP server, so any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, …) gets persistent cross-session memory that runs entirely on the local machine — no LLM calls, no API keys, no data leaves the box. Most memory MCPs can't say that.

Install with the mcp extra, then add it to your client's config:

pip install "genome-memory[mcp]"

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "genome": { "command": "genome-mcp" }
  }
}

Tools the agent gets: remember (store a fact/preference, local + 0 LLM), recall (semantic search), forget (delete the memory matching a query), reset_memories (clear a user's memories). Memories persist in ~/.genome/memories.db (override with the GENOME_MCP_DB env var). Run standalone with genome-mcp or python -m genome.mcp.server.

Run it as an HTTP API

Prefer HTTP? GENOME ships a FastAPI server that mirrors the library 1:1 (add / search / get / update / delete / reset / synthesize), with an auto-generated OpenAPI spec at /docs.

pip install "genome-memory[fastapi]"

Try it locally (keyless, loopback only — one flag makes the "no auth" intent explicit):

GENOME_ALLOW_NO_AUTH=1 python -m genome.server        # serves on 127.0.0.1:8080

curl -X POST localhost:8080/v1/memories \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"text": "Ada met Lin at the robotics summit in Berlin.", "user_id": "u1"}'

curl -X POST localhost:8080/v1/search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query": "Where did Ada meet Lin?", "user_id": "u1", "limit": 5}'

Safe by default. The server refuses to serve unauthenticated unless you opt in as above, and it will not bind a non-loopback interface without a key. To expose it, set an API key (sent as X-API-Key) — required to bind beyond localhost:

GENOME_API_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) GENOME_HOST=0.0.0.0 python -m genome.server
# then add:  -H "X-API-Key: $GENOME_API_KEY"  to every request

For multi-tenant deployments, set GENOME_REQUIRE_SCOPE=1 to require user_id/agent_id on every call and disable the global reset. Docker: docker-compose up (needs GENOME_API_KEY and POSTGRES_PASSWORD; Postgres is published on loopback only). Full guide, including the Postgres backend and every env var: docs/tutorial_quickstart.md.

TypeScript / JavaScript client

@northtek/genome-memory mirrors the Python Memory API shape against this server (ESM, Node 20+ or browser):

npm install @northtek/genome-memory

import { Memory } from "@northtek/genome-memory";

const mem = new Memory({ baseUrl: "http://localhost:8080" });
await mem.add({ text: "Ada met Lin in Berlin.", userId: "u1" });
const hits = await mem.search({ query: "Where did Ada meet Lin?", userId: "u1" });

Full client docs: sdks/typescript/README.md.

The honest results

Same responder + judge + embedder for every system; only the memory layer changes.

What we measured	Result	Verdict
Answer accuracy, in-window (LoCoMo)	GENOME 0.851 vs Mem0 0.855 (p > 0.23)	Tied
Answer accuracy, harder bench (LongMemEval, n=90 & n=205)	directionally ahead, not significant (p = 0.14–0.19)	Tied
Accuracy when history overflows the context window	+0.409 at 80× less context (p = 8e-10)	Win
Cost to store a message	0 LLM calls vs 1+; 837–8,433× cheaper	Win
Write path	~10 ms, air-gapped, 0 network calls	Win
Point-in-time ("what was true at T")	belief-state 0.870 vs Mem0 0.676 (synthetic data)	Win, with caveat
Retrieval hit-rate with reranking	improves hit@10 (up to 0.943); local + free	Win

What we tested that didn't help (so you don't have to)

We publish our nulls — it's how you know the wins are real:

• Synthesis / consolidation: accuracy-neutral at equal token budget (p = 0.86).
• Hybrid (BM25 + dense) and graph retrieval: hybrid underperformed plain dense on LoCoMo; graph was not validated here.
• Reranking's accuracy gain is embedder-dependent: it reliably improves retrieval hit-rate, but its effect on final answer accuracy depends on the embedder — treat it as a retrieval-quality tool, not a guaranteed accuracy win.

Bi-temporal memory: "what was true at time T"

GENOME can track how facts change over time and answer point-in-time questions — something overwrite-based memory structurally can't do (it only keeps the latest value):

from genome.memory.belief import ingest_belief_turn, answer_belief_context

mem = Memory(storage="genome.db", llm_call=my_llm_fn)

# facts land at their DOMAIN time (parsed from the text), not wall-clock ingest time
ingest_belief_turn(mem, "In March 2024, Jordan moved to Seattle.", session_time=t0, user_id="u")
ingest_belief_turn(mem, "Jordan just moved to Austin.", session_time=t2, user_id="u")

answer_belief_context(mem, "Where does Jordan live now?", user_id="u")            # -> Austin
answer_belief_context(mem, "Where did Jordan live in early 2024?", user_id="u")   # -> Seattle
answer_belief_context(mem, "List every city Jordan has lived in.", user_id="u")   # -> Seattle; Austin

On the TempBelief benchmark it answers as-of queries at 0.870 vs Mem0's 0.676, with the knowledge graph audited at 0.97 precision / 0.96 recall. Caveat: TempBelief is synthetic text with explicit dates; the edge shrinks on natural speech. Real capability, bounded proof.

Optional features

Opt-in; the default path stays LLM-free and local at ingest.

mem = Memory(
    storage="genome.db",
    llm_call=my_llm_fn,             # LLM-based fact extraction on add()
    resolve_conflicts=True,         # ADD/UPDATE/DELETE vs existing memories
    auto_extract_entities=True,     # entity graph for graph retrieval
    auto_consolidate_threshold=200, # summarize-or-prune when a scope grows past N
)
mem.search("...", user_id="u1", mode="hybrid")   # modes: "dense" (default), "hybrid", "graph"

Reranking (local, free, no API):

from genome.memory.rerank import CrossEncoderReranker
mem = Memory(storage="genome.db", reranker=CrossEncoderReranker())   # lazy-loaded
mem.search("Where did the user go on vacation?", user_id="u1", limit=5)  # reranked

Reproduce the benchmarks

The LoCoMo and LongMemEval datasets are not bundled (they carry their own licenses — LoCoMo is CC BY-NC 4.0). See benchmarks/data/README.md to download them. The first two lines need no dataset and no API keys:

python benchmarks/local_writepath.py        # local write path: ~10ms/msg, 0 network
python benchmarks/tco_project.py            # deployment cost projection
python benchmarks/verdict.py                # in-window accuracy + McNemar
python benchmarks/haystack_report.py        # overflow / context-window crossover
python benchmarks/ingest_cost.py --n 80     # measured ingestion cost vs Mem0
python benchmarks/lme_qa.py --n 90          # LongMemEval head-to-head vs Mem0
python benchmarks/tempbelief_run.py --convs 6   # bi-temporal point-in-time vs baselines

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE.

GENOME is free and open source: read it, modify it, self-host it, and embed it in your own applications — commercial use included — under the terms of Apache 2.0. Questions: info@northtek.io.

Copyright 2026 Northtek (FrostByte Digital LLC).