The company is also emerging as a leader in developing artificial intelligence software in China and is quickly developing real products and applications around this next wave of technology. Among the many examples are Baidu's AI-powered chatbots that help doctors more effectively diagnose diseases, software to help banks prevent fraud more effectively, and learning algorithms that enable self-driving cars to navigate streets more safely. Helping invent the future involves significant near-term investments from Baidu, and the exact payoff for such efforts isn't certain. However, between the long-term growth potential of its lucrative search business and the chance to dominate several important areas of the future of technology, Baidu's overall outlooks remains quite favorable indeed.

Areas like virtual reality, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence matured from seemingly distant concepts into tangible products that will eventually upend the ways people live and work. Amid all of this excitement, shares of artificial intelligence companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook each outperformed the Nasdaq Composite benchmark in 2016. Not all AI stocks performed as swimmingly, though. And more importantly, what does this mean for each of these artificial intelligence stocks heading in 2017? Baidu is in the midst of conforming to new, tougher standards for its search results that the Chinese government mandated earlier this year after the death of a Chinese student sparked a national uproar surrounding shady online advertising practices among pseudo-healthcare companies.