He credits his participation in theeffective altruism (EA) movement-linked80,000 Hours program for his career focus towards AI safety, though denied being an advocate for EA.[2]
Hendrycks is the main author of the research paper that introduced theactivation function GELU in 2016,[5] and of the paper that introduced the language model benchmarkMMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) in 2020.[6][7]
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 hownatural selection and competitive pressures could shape the goals ofartificial 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 ofxAI, an AI startup company founded byElon Musk in 2023. To avoid any potential conflicts of interest, he receives a symbolicone-dollar salary and holds no company equity.[1][17] In November 2024, he also joinedScale AI as an advisor collecting a one-dollar salary.[18] Hendrycks is the creator ofHumanity's Last Exam, a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities oflarge language models, which he developed in collaboration with Scale AI.[19][20]
In 2024 Hendrycks published a 568 page book entitled "Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society" based on courseware he had previously developed.[21]
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.
