Memories AI Realized AI Can Think But Not Remember

In September 2025, Shawn Shen, co-founder and CEO of Memories.ai, said his team was “building an AI model that can see and remember just like humans.” That comment came as the San Francisco startup began an aggressive hiring push, offering compensation packages of up to $2 million to recruit top researchers from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, xAI, and other AI labs. Among the new hires was Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist who joined as Chief AI Officer to advance the company’s long-context video understanding work.

Now, that vision is entering the hardware phase. Through a new partnership with Qualcomm, Memories.ai will integrate its Large Visual Memory Model (LVMM) 2.0 into Snapdragon-powered phones, PCs, cameras, and wearables starting in 2026, Qualcomm’s first public collaboration with a company focused entirely on visual memory. AIM Media House spoke exclusively to Shen about the partnership and future plans.

Giving Machines Visual Recall

The idea behind LVMM, Shen explained, came from a simple observation: video data is enormous and difficult to search, while text is small and inherently indexable. “The idea was to add a missing visual memory layer for video,” he said. “For text, the files are small and searchable by default. Video isn’t a ten-minute clip can be more than a hundred gigabytes, with different voices, faces, and locations. LVMM turns those raw frames into structured memory so AI can find exact moments and answer broader questions.”

LVMM 2.0 compresses and encodes frames, stripping away noise while fusing video, audio, and image information into a unified format. “Video has always been the toughest format for AI which is messy, dense, and hard to index,” Shen said. “LVMM 2.0 encodes frames, compresses them, and builds a sub-second index. It fuses video, audio, and images so results keep context. No more hoping transcripts match what the eyes see.”