Scholarship is a vocation.
— Max Weber
Marx is a curious name. Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Planck — each left a deep mark on those who came after him. We wanted to draw on their strength: to give an AI something like real thought and let it enter social-science research. We wanted one useful, safe workspace that serves researchers.
The name Marx Max comes from them. Karl Marx taught us to look at modern society through structures and relationships; Max Weber reminds researchers to stay conscious of their own methods.
Before I seriously considered making a product, it was only my own research tool. A very bare, dark terminal was my workspace. It did not even have a name; we just called it the “research assistant.” It was little more than an agent core that could use tools plus Stata-MCP. Later, I added Zotero-MCP to connect my literature library.
Then we started receiving emails. Some people liked Stata-MCP; many others told us they did not know how to configure it. We tried writing detailed documentation, but AI was changing so quickly that the instructions went out of date faster and faster.
We tried several approaches.
That’s how this product came to be.
The plum blossom smells sweetest after the bitter cold. We started building this product in the winter of 2025. In a room under ten square metres, one person, one laptop — that’s where the first Marx Max took shape. What business does a non-CS-trained economist have building AI?
I do economics research myself, and I have connected these tools to my own work. I know where finding papers, organising materials, checking Stata results, and writing up the findings can get stuck. When I do not know how to solve an engineering problem, I learn, try, and revise. A feature stays only after I have tested it in my own research; at least I know where to begin asking what a researcher needs.
We tried many names. “Cyber Research Assistant” was the first, but it sounded bad enough that we dropped it quickly. After a long time thinking, a friend sent me an article called Science as a Vocation. It caught me immediately. Max Weber was someone who had once kept me awake at night trying to understand him.
From Weber, my thoughts turned to Karl Marx — another thinker whose ideas kept me reflecting.
And there was Max Planck, whom I admired for three full years in high school.
Just like that, the pieces clicked. What about “Thanks”? In Chinese it sounds like “三克思,” a joke about three names that sound like Marx or Max.
Just kidding. After a chain that long, how could we possibly call it Thanks?
The end result, obviously, was Marx Max.
A word on the two Marxes I actually know
Karl Marx and Max Weber are the founders of the social sciences. Each represents a different tradition.
What stays with me when I read Marx is not a conclusion I can simply apply. He keeps asking what relationships and structures made the thing in front of us possible. Research that stops at a neat result may miss the conditions that produced it.
Reading Weber is a different kind of “torture.” He makes me ask why I chose this question, how I understand the meanings people give to their actions, and whether I am making an empirical judgement or slipping in a value judgement of my own. No tool can answer those questions for a researcher.
I put both of them into the name Marx Max because I want this tool to help us find materials, run code, and carry a discussion forward without deciding for us what the question is or how to interpret a result.
Scholarship is a vocation. A tool can help, but that part cannot be handed off to it.