Elon Musk’s AI company xAI has experienced a glitch in its AI chatbot Grok that caused it to randomly string together words unrelated to user queries. Users who requested PDF document generation reportedly received multiple paragraphs of sentences jumbled with disconnected words such as “planets” and “cheese.”<\/p>\n
According to TechCrunch, one user asked Grok to create a PDF document but received an incomprehensible sentence: “match it without and your they and two for planets can practical and often cheese\u2026” Similar gibberish continued across multiple paragraphs. Another user reported that checking the source links attached to the response revealed a string of URLs pointing to reinforcement learning research sites.<\/p>\n
The error was primarily identified among users of “Grok Lite,” the lightweight version of the chatbot. Affected users said they first noticed the anomaly on Wednesday morning. However, TechCrunch was unable to reproduce the error in its own testing, suggesting the issue affected only a very small fraction of total users.<\/p>\n
On Reddit’s Grok user community, posts describing similar symptoms appeared in succession. While starting a new conversation or regenerating a response often restored normal behavior, some users reported that the error persisted even after multiple attempts.<\/p>\n
The issue only occurred when users asked questions directly on Grok’s official website (grok.com). No similar phenomena were reported from Grok accounts operating within the X platform.<\/p>\n
Grok’s official account responded to user complaints on Thursday morning, stating: “A pure word salad is a rare, temporary generation error. The official status page (status.x.ai) shows all Grok services operating normally with no incidents registered. Starting a new chat or regenerating a response resolves the issue immediately in most cases.”<\/p>\n
xAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, xAI has experienced significant personnel departures in recent months. According to a May report from The Information, most of the founding members and at least 50 researchers and engineers have left the company. Despite this, xAI released its latest foundation model in July, describing it as “an Opus-class model that is faster, more token-efficient, and lower cost.”<\/p>\n