In a city obsessed with betting on the next big thing, Cerebral Valley AI Conference turned its instincts inward. Before the panel featuring AI heavyweights like Anthropic and xAI ended on Wednesday, founders and investors in the audience were asked a question rarely asked out loud in Silicon Valley. Which billion-dollar AI startup would it bet on?
What does the crowd think? Topping the list of companies most likely to fail was search startup Perplexity, followed by OpenAI, a surprising second place for a child of the AI boom.
An informal survey of more than 300 participants conducted by organizer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer highlighted what many stakeholders are whispering. Despite the flood of AI money in the valley, cracks are beginning to appear in trust in the biggest players.
Survey from the 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Ben Bergman/BI
Unscientific and anonymous research should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. Yet while many venture capitalists and founders at this conference and elsewhere talk about the AI bubble, they are usually too polite to name names, making this fact clear. Unlike the public market, individual investors don’t actually short companies. In Silicon Valley, speaking negatively about startups in public without a verified reason is considered bad behavior.
For those who follow Silicon Valley, it’s no surprise that Perplexity, an AI search browser that is trying to take on Google, ranks at the top of the list.
Perplexity has become the poster child of what some consider an AI bubble, as it has raised successive funding rounds every few months and seen voracious investor demand at valuations ranging from $14 billion to as much as $50 billion, Business Insider recently reported.
When asked for comment on the Cerebral Valley investigation, Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer responded via email:
It may be a little surprising that OpenAI ranks second on the list, as it is seen as the clear consumer winner of the AI revolution.
Still, its soaring valuation and trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending have surprised some investors. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)
While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says we’re in an AI bubble, he strongly disputed his company’s inflated valuation in a recent interview with investor Brad Gerstner.
“How can a company with $13 billion in sales commit to spending $1.4 trillion?” Gerstner asked Altman.
“If you want to sell your stock, I’ll find you a buyer,” Mr. Altman said in response to Mr. Gerstner’s question. “sufficient.”
Mr. Altman has a point. Lest anyone think they’re about to unload their OpenAI and Perplexity stock, in a separate survey question asking which company to bet on, both companies appeared on opposite sides of the deal.
Slides at Cerebral Valley AI Conference Ben Bergman/BI
Anthropic, which Business Insider recently reported was considering a new round of funding worth $350 billion, leads the list.
What we mostly disagreed on is that we’re in a bubble right now, but that’s not necessarily a cause for concern.
“I think every technology cycle is a bubble by definition,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushuman said on stage. “And the real question is, what companies are going to survive and how big are they going to be?”
On the same panel, private VC Elad Gil compared the current bubble to the dot-com bust of the late 1990s.
“There will be dozens of large ones, a handful of large ones that span generations, and then all the others will disappear in one way or another,” Gill said.
Whether Perplexity becomes the next Google or Altavista is what investors like Gil and Fushman are paid to predict.
