How Do They Make Money?

Baidu as a China AI play in response to Trump's project Stargate?

Our mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. We are a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation. We have been consistently investing in AI since 2010 to solidify our technology advancement, improve search capabilities and boost overall monetization. The breadth and depth of our AI capabilities provide the differentiating foundational technologies that power all of our businesses.

We have invested significant resources in the research and development of AI technology and have made significant progress in the commercialization of AI-enabled offerings, including in-app services, cloud services and solutions, intelligent driving services and solutions and smart devices and services. We plan to continue to invest capital and other resources into our AI-enabled business operations, in particular, generative AI and foundation models. However, AI technology is rapidly evolving with significant uncertainties, and we cannot assure you that our investment and exploration in AI technology and AI-enabled products and services will be successful.

Baidu is essentially China's version of Google re their primary search engine. They are also making significant investments into autonomous driving.

We have put our leading AI into innovative use to reinvent our products and offerings and to create new ones. For example, we are the first recipient of driverless licenses in China and the U.S. and we have been offering fully driverless ride-hailing services on open roads in Wuhan and Chongqing since August 2022.

Baidu was founded as a search engine business in 2000 with the belief that technology can change the way people discover and consume information. At the heart of Baidu search is its ability to better understand a users’ search queries and to answer these queries by matching the most relevant information in ranked search results. To achieve this, we continually innovate and develop new technologies and products that enhance Baidu search user experience. We began to use AI a decade ago to power these technologies in order to better match user search intent with the large amount of information on the internet. For instance, our natural language processing, an AI capability, enables the understanding of important details of a query, particularly in complex conversational queries. This helps optimize search results returned and increase the satisfaction rate of users. Years of tagging, understanding and intelligently processing all forms of content on the internet—text, images and videos—with AI has enabled us to further develop leading AI technologies and commercialize them through products and services for consumers, enterprises and the public sector. Our ability to continually invest heavily in research and development is made possible by the durable revenue that we generated as a leading Internet platform.

We believe we have built a large and strong portfolio of products and services to give Baidu the scale necessary to invest heavily in technology, while optimizing our future for sustainable long-term growth. We derive significant synergies by incorporating the AI developed for search into other parts of our business. For example, large daily use of our visual search and voice search may be used to improve Apollo sensing capability and DuerOS speech recognition capabilities. Our operations are primarily conducted in mainland China. For the year ended December 31, 2023, more than 97% of our group’s total revenues were generated from mainland China, and as of December 31, 2023, more than 78% of our group’s total assets were based in mainland China.