Dan Hendrycks

San Francisco, California, United States

GrantmakerRegrantor

Bio

Updated 05/21/26

Executive and Research Director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS). A nonprofit research organization based in San Francisco focused on reducing societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence. He received a B.S. from the University of Chicago in 2018 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2022, advised by Dawn Song and Jacob Steinhardt. His research spans machine learning safety, robustness, out-of-distribution detection, and AI ethics. He is the primary author of the GELU activation function (2016), which is widely used in state-of-the-art models including BERT and GPT, and created the MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) benchmark (2020), one of the most widely used LLM evaluation benchmarks. He also co-developed the MATH benchmark, Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), and authored the 2024 textbook Introduction to AI Safety, Ethics, and Society. He serves as a safety advisor to xAI and Scale AI, both at nominal compensation, and has received early-career funding from EA-aligned organizations for his work on value learning and AI alignment benchmarks.