An unusual glitch caused xAI’s Grok chatbot to speak gibberish to many users.
After asking the model to generate a PDF, one user received a response similar to the following: “If you match without it, they and two for Planets are practical and often cheesy…” followed by several paragraphs of similar nonsense.
When checking the source links, another user found a string of links to reinforcement learning research sites.
Affected users who spoke to TechCrunch said they were using Grok Lite and noticed the issue on Wednesday morning. TechCrunch’s own testing has not been able to reproduce this issue, and it may only be affecting some users. xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Still, the result was confusion for many Grok users. The chatbot Reddit community has been flooded with complaints. Refreshing the session often restores normal functionality, but some users reported that the gibberish response persisted even after multiple refreshes.
This bug appears to be limited to direct queries on Grok.com. Grok accounts on X.com are not affected.
In response to a disgruntled user, the Grok account confirmed the issue with X.
“That pure word salad is a rare temporary generation glitch. The official status at https://status.x.ai shows all Grok services are fully operational without any issues. Please start a new chat or regenerate. It usually clears up quickly. Sorry for the gibberish,” the account wrote on Thursday morning.
Information magazine reported in May that xAI has undergone significant personnel changes in recent months, losing most of its founding team and at least 50 researchers and engineers. The company released its latest underlying model in July, describing it as “an Opus-class model, but faster, more token efficient, and lower cost.”
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