Perplexity faces harsh crowd verdict at major San Francisco AI conference: ‘Most likely to flop’ | Mint

Perplexity faces harsh crowd verdict at major San Francisco AI conference: ‘Most likely to flop’ | Mint

By Aman Gupta
Publication Date: 2025-11-16 15:43:00

Over the last few years, Aravind Srinivas led Perplexity has established itself as one of the key AI startups trying to take on the dominance of Google in not just search but even in the browser space. However, in a recent informal survey conducted in San Francisco with more than 300 attendees, the dominant opinion was that Perplexity is the most likely billion dollar AI startup which could fall, Business Insider reported.

Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer, while responding to the Cerebral Valley survey to Business Insider, said, “Geeze, it sounds more like the judgmental valley conference.”

What’s worse is that Perplexity was followed by OpenAI in the second spot. Notably, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has lost some momentum to Google’s Gemini and other rivals in the last few months, but the chatbot continues to remain the overwhelming leader in the AI race in terms of market share.

Similar to Perplexity, OpenAI has also been rolling out products that go beyond its usual niche including an AI powered browser called ChatGPT Atlas, a social media app called Sora and most recently a Group Chat feature for ChatGPT.

While it was once predicted that the new age startups could take away Google’s lunch money, it seems like the mood of a few investors is swinging in the other direction.

Fear over AI bubble:

In the last few months, there has been a lot of debate over whether the AI industry is in a bubble, with startups raising billions of dollars without having clear notions about profitability….