An unusual glitch has resulted in xAI’s Grok chatbot speaking gibberish to many users. After asking the model to generate a PDF, one user received the response: “match it without and your they and two for planets can practical and often cheese…” with similar nonsense continuing for several paragraphs.
Checking 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 issues as early as Wednesday morning. TechCrunch was unable to reproduce the issue in our own testing, and it is likely affecting only a small subset of users. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
The bug appears to be limited to direct queries on Grok.com. The Grok account on X.com has been unaffected. Responding to unhappy users, the Grok account confirmed the issues on X:
"That pure word salad is a rare temporary generation glitch. Official status at https://status.x.ai shows all Grok services fully operational with no incidents. Start a fresh chat or regenerate—it usually clears right away. Sorry about the gibberish,"The bug has overwhelmed the chatbot’s Reddit community, with many users complaining. Refreshing the session often restores normal function, but some users reported that the gibberish responses continued even after multiple refreshes.
