Following on its rececent launch of Azure OpenAI Service, software giant Microsoft has deepened its investment in OpenAI, the company that has dominated headlines by offering free public access to generative AI tools incuding ChatGPT and generative art tool Dall•E 2.

Accrording to the Wall Street Journal, the financial terms of the new investment were not disclosed. However, the New York Times reported that Microsoft is investing $10 billion in OpenAi, an amount that has been the subject of investment rumors in recent weeks.

This latest move comes as part of an ongoing partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI that started in 2019. At the time, Microsoft invested $1 billion in the company. Over the next few years, they "quietly invested another $2 billion" in OpenAI according to the New York Times. Microsoft's focus on working with OpenAI is rumored to be related to an imminent launch of a new version of its search engine Bing that incorporates OpenAI's GPT-3.5 technology, in a move that Microsoft hopes will compete with search giant Google.