Nov 18, 2025•12:33pm UTC

Perplexity, OpenAI voted flop risks at AI conference

erplexity and OpenAI may have gotten the worst superlatives AI companies can get.

At the Cerebral Valley AI Conference this weekend, an informal survey of more than 300 attendees organized by journalist Eric Newcomer found that Perplexity, followed by OpenAI, was voted most likely to flop.

These companies, along with the rest of the AI market, seek to cement strong enough revenue streams to break even. But the sentiment that Perplexity and OpenAI may struggle with this is “spot on,” Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View. However, these firms may topple for different reasons.

Perplexity’s success hinges on getting consumers to actually buy into its services, said Bickley. But the startup also relies on other foundational models, including those from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

And with so many other options clouding the consumer market, namely the ever-popular ChatGPT, “the question is, what makes me want to go to Perplexity and pay to have the benefits of their deep search capabilities versus what is provided in Google with Gemini for free?”

While OpenAI’s situation is far more complex, given the $1.4 trillion in AI infrastructure commitments it’s signed onto, the company still faces the “conundrum on the consumer side,” said Bickley. “There's going to be limited dollars that someone's willing to spend on a subscription,” he said.

The value add for a consumer has to be significant, said Bickley, especially in OpenAI’s case. In order to emerge from the red, OpenAI may need to become a “super app,” he added, offering multiple functionalities in one ecosystem, such as ecommerce, communication and entertainment.

And this may be part of its grand plan: In an interview with Wired published Monday, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, said ChatGPT could “give everyone a team,” including a personal shopper, a travel agent, a financial adviser, a health coach and more, wrapped into one. “If we build that, I assume that people are going to want to pay a lot of money for that, and that revenue is going to come.”

Our Deeper View

OpenAI and Perplexity could take the route well trodden by its tech forefathers in making money off consumers: Advertising. Digital ads are how Meta and Google have made the billions upon billions of dollars that support their own expensive AI endeavors. Ramping up those efforts could help these firms gain returns far more quickly than they would from subscription revenue.

But OpenAI in particular faces a far more daunting task. Given the sheer amount of money it’s signed on to spend, even with its efforts spread across consumer and enterprise plans, Bickley noted, “how many hundreds of millions of users do you need to bring those revenues up to a point where (its investments) make sense?”