Google has given a small group of companies access to an early version of its highly anticipated conversational artificial intelligence software, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. Giving outside developers access to the software, known as Gemini, means Google is getting close to incorporating it in its consumer services and selling it to businesses through the company’s cloud unit.

Gemini is intended to compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which has begun to generate meaningful revenue for the startup as financial institutions and other businesses pay to access the model and the ChatGPT chatbot it powers.