Grok keeps sending gibberish responses to users
xAI's Grok chatbot has been sending nonsensical, garbled text to some users, in what the company describes as a temporary generation glitch. Users on Grok Lite reported the issue as early as Wednesday morning, with the bot producing strings of unrelated words instead of coherent answers, sometimes accompanied by unexplained links to reinforcement learning research sites. The fault appears limited to Grok.com queries, leaving the Grok account on X unaffected, and comes as xAI faces scrutiny following significant staff departures.
TechCrunch was unable to reproduce the problem itself and believes it affects only a small subset of users, though the chatbot's Reddit community has been flooded with complaints. Refreshing the session often fixes the issue, though some users found the gibberish persisted even after repeated attempts. Responding on X, the Grok account acknowledged the glitch on Thursday, saying its status page showed all services operational and advising users to start a fresh chat. The disruption follows reports of xAI losing most of its founding team and at least 50 researchers and engineers since May, and comes weeks after the company launched its latest model in July.
- Grok chatbot has been producing gibberish responses since Wednesday
- Issue seems confined to Grok Lite users on Grok.com, not X
- xAI says it's a temporary glitch; company has seen major staff turnover
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Grok is a chatbot made by xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk. People can use it on Grok.com or through an account on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Chatbots generate replies by using trained computer models to predict text in response to a prompt. Grok Lite is one version of the service, and xAI has also released newer models; problems with one way of accessing Grok do not necessarily affect every version or user.
The reliability of AI services matters to people who use them for information and other tasks. xAI’s staffing changes have also drawn attention to the company’s ability to develop and maintain its products.