Dan Hendrycks
American machine learning researcher
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Dan Hendrycks (born 1994 or 1995[1]) is an American machine learning researcher. He serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit research organization based in San Francisco, California.
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UC Berkeley (Ph.D., 2022)
Center for AI Safety
Dan Hendrycks | |
|---|---|
Hendrycks in 2025 | |
| Born | 1994 or 1995 (age 30–31) |
| Education | University of Chicago (B.S., 2018) UC Berkeley (Ph.D., 2022) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | UC Berkeley Center for AI Safety |
Early life and education
Hendrycks was raised in a Christian evangelical household in Marshfield, Missouri.[2][3] He received a B.S. from the University of Chicago in 2018 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in Computer Science in 2022.[4]
Career and research
Hendrycks' research focuses on topics that include machine learning safety, machine ethics, and robustness. He credits his participation in the effective altruism (EA) movement-linked 80,000 Hours program for his career focus towards AI safety, though denies being an advocate for EA.[2]
Hendrycks is the main author of the research paper that introduced the activation function GELU in 2016,[5] and of the paper that introduced the language model benchmark MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) in 2020.[6][7]
In February 2022, Hendrycks co-authored recommendations for the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to inform the management of risks from artificial intelligence.[8][9]
In September 2022, Hendrycks wrote a paper providing a framework for analyzing the impact of AI research on societal risks.[10][11] He later published a paper in March 2023 examining how natural selection and competitive pressures could shape the goals of artificial agents.[12][13][14] This was followed by "An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks", which discusses four categories of risks: malicious use, AI race dynamics, organizational risks, and rogue AI agents.[15][16]
Hendrycks is the safety adviser of xAI, an AI startup company founded by Elon Musk in 2023. To avoid any potential conflicts of interest, he receives a symbolic one-dollar salary and holds no company equity.[1][17] In November 2024, he also joined Scale AI as an advisor collecting a one-dollar salary.[18] Hendrycks is the creator of Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models, which he developed in collaboration with Scale AI.[19][20]
In 2024, Hendrycks published the textbook Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society, based on courseware he had previously developed.[21]
Selected publications
- Hendrycks, Dan; Gimpel, Kevin (2020-07-08). "Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)". arXiv:1606.08415 [cs.LG].
- Hendrycks, Dan; Gimpel, Kevin (2018-10-03). "A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks". International Conference on Learning Representations 2017. arXiv:1610.02136.
- Hendrycks, Dan; Mazeika, Mantas; Dietterich, Thomas (2019-01-28). "Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure". International Conference on Learning Representations 2019. arXiv:1812.04606.
- Hendrycks, Dan; Mazeika, Mantas; Zou, Andy (2021-10-25). "What Would Jiminy Cricket Do? Towards Agents That Behave Morally". Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2021. arXiv:2110.13136.