He credits his participation in the
effective altruism (EA) movement-linked
80,000 Hours program for his career focus towards AI safety, though denied being an advocate for EA.[2]
In September 2022, Hendrycks wrote a paper providing a framework for analyzing the impact of AI research on societal risks.[7][8] He later published a paper in March 2023 examining how
natural selection and competitive pressures could shape the goals of
artificial agents.[9][10][11] 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.[12][13]
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][14]
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.