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Humanity's Last Exam
Language model benchmark From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) is a language model benchmark consisting of 2,500 questions across a broad range of subjects. It was created jointly by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI.
Creation
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Perspective
Stanford HAI's AI Index 2025 Annual Report cites Humanity's Last Exam as one of the "more challenging benchmarks" developed in response to the popular AI benchmarks having reached "saturation".[1] The test has been described as the brainchild of Dan Hendrycks, a machine learning researcher and the director of the Center for AI Safety, who stated that he was inspired to create the test after a conversation with Elon Musk, who thought the existing language model benchmarks, such as the MMLU, were too easy. Hendrycks worked with Scale AI to compile the questions.[2] The questions were crowdsourced from subject matter experts from various institutions across the world.[3][4] The questions were first filtered by the leading AI models; if the models failed to answer the question or did worse than random guessing on the multiple-choice questions, they were reviewed by human experts in two rounds and approved for inclusion in the dataset. The submitters of the top-rated questions were given prize money from a pool of 500,000 U.S. dollars—$5000 for each of the top 50 questions and $500 for the next 500. After the initial release, a "community feedback bug bounty program" was opened to "identify and remove major errors in the dataset".[4]
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Composition
The benchmark consists of 2,500 questions in the publicly released set. The paper classifies the questions into the following broad subjects: mathematics (41%), physics (9%), biology/medicine (11%), humanities/social science (9%), computer science/artificial intelligence (10%), engineering (4%), chemistry (7%), and other (9%). Around 14% of the questions require the ability to understand both text and images, i.e., multi-modality. 24% of the questions are multiple-choice; the rest are short-answer, exact-match questions. A private set is also maintained to test for benchmark overfitting.[4]
An example question:[2]
Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.
An independent investigation by FutureHouse, published in July 2025,[5] suggests that around 30% of the HLE answers for text-only chemistry and biology questions may be incorrect.
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