Microsoft has announced that it will soon add OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT to its Azure cloud service. This move is an extension of the existing partnership between the two companies, as Microsoft is said to be considering investing up to $10 billion in OpenAI. The Azure OpenAI Service, which has been available to a limited number of customers since its launch in 2021, will give Microsoft’s cloud customers access to various OpenAI tools such as the GPT-3.5 language system that ChatGPT is based on and the Dall-E model for generating images from text prompts. This will allow Azure customers to use OpenAI products in their own applications running on the cloud, and it is expected to be available for the general public soon.

This move comes as Microsoft is looking to get an inside edge on the most popular and advanced AI systems in order to boost its own products in competition with Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. ChatGPT, which was launched at the end of November 2020, has received a lot of attention for its ability to imitate human conversation and there have been speculations about its potential to replace professional writers and even threaten Google’s core search business.

The organization behind ChatGPT, co-founded by Elon Musk and Silicon Valley investor Sam Altman, makes money by charging developers to license its technology. The new technology comes at the end of a year of headline-grabbing advances in AI, and OpenAI is already working on a successor GPT-4 model for its natural language processing. But still, concern about its accuracy has prompted caution about its premature use, and New York City schools have banned its students from accessing ChatGPT.

In addition, Microsoft is currently using OpenAI’s Codex to add automation to its GitHub unit’s Copilot programming tool, and it’s adding that feature to Azure along with the other OpenAI tools. The company wants to adopt even more OpenAI technology in its Bing search engine, Office productivity applications, Teams chat program and security software.