At the Cerebral Valley Summit in San Francisco, more than 300 artificial intelligence experts... (AI) Founders and investors have ranked Perplexity as the startup most likely to fail, with star AI company OpenAI surprisingly coming in second.
Perplexity, founded in 2022 by former OpenAI researcher Aravend Srinivas and others, is an AI search engine designed to improve the efficiency of assistants. It is currently valued at approximately $20 billion, and its shareholders include Amazon. Founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia Databricks, Samsung, etc.
Clearly, the results of this anonymous survey show a significant shift in sentiment in Silicon Valley.
When asked which private tech companies they would invest in, attendees chose Anthropic over OpenAI, the two companies that have been fierce competitors in the large model space, although there is a consensus that OpenAI will lead the LMARaena leaderboard next year—one of the world’s leading AI model ranking and evaluation systems.
In fact, OpenAI's valuation jumped from $14 billion to nearly $500 billion in a short period of time. The frenzy surrounding it has sounded alarm bells for analysts, leading some to compare it to the dot-com bubble era.
The survey results also show that other startups on the list include Cursor, Figure, Harvey, Mercor, Mistral, and Thinking Machines.
Will Anthropic defeat OpenAI?
Perhaps more interestingly, experts and investors have seen a rapid rise in favorability toward another startup, Anthropic, marking a shift in investor sentiment toward the AI race.
According to relevant data, Anthropic's revenue grew from $87 million at the beginning of 2024 to more than $5 billion in August 2025. Last September, the company completed a $13 billion Series F funding round at a valuation of $183 billion.
According to data compiled by Menlo Ventures, the company has captured 32% of the enterprise AI market, surpassing OpenAI's 25% share.
Anthropic launched its developer tool, Claude Code, in May of this year, and according to the company, it generates over $500 million in annual revenue. Its enterprise customer base has grown from less than 1,000 two years ago to over 300,000 today.
However, given OpenAI's dominant market position, its second-place ranking in the "most likely to fail" category is still surprising. Financial concerns, however, may explain this pessimism. OpenAI projects $13 billion in revenue this year, while expecting losses of $9 billion. Operating losses are projected to reach $74 billion by 2028.
In summary, the company appears to be facing a major problem: 95% of ChatGPT's 800 million users do not pay for the service. On the other hand, OpenAI has pledged to invest over $1 trillion over the next decade, primarily in computing infrastructure.
Meanwhile, financial documents show that Anthropic expects to break even in 2028, while OpenAI will not reach this milestone until 2030.
(Source: Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily)
