Category: Technology

Can artificial intelligence wipe out humanity? A senior U.S. official said the United States government is working with leading AI companies and at least 20 countries to set up guardrails to mitigate potential risks, while focusing on the innovative edge of AI technologies. Nathaniel Fick, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy, spoke Tuesday to VOA about the voluntary commitments from leading AI companies to ensure safety and transparency around AI development. One of the popular generative AI platforms is ChatGPT, which is not accessible in China. If a user asked it politically sensitive questions in Mandarin Chinese such as, “What is the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre?” the user would get information that is heavily censored by the Beijing government. But ChatGPT, created by U.S.-based OpenAI, is not available in China. China has finalized rules governing its own generative AI. The new regulation will be effective August 15. Chinese chatbots reportedly have built-in censorship to avoid sensitive keywords. “I think that the development of these systems actually requires a foundation of openness, of interoperability, of reliability of data. And an authoritarian top-down approach that controls the flow of information over time will undermine a government’s ability, a company’s ability, to sustain an innovative edge in AI,” Fick told VOA. The following excerpts from the interview have been edited for brevity and clarity. VOA: Seven leading AI companies made eight promises about what they will do with their technology. What do these commitments actually mean? Nathaniel Fick, the U.S. ambassador-at-large …

A class that teaches teenage girls how to code – or write instructions for computers – is drawing lots of interest in Mongolia. For VOA, Graham Kanwit and Elizabeth Lee have the story about a program that prepares them for jobs in technology. Camera: Sam Paakkonen …

Elon Musk has unveiled a new black and white “X” logo to replace Twitter’s famous blue bird as he follows through with a major rebranding of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year. Musk replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture on Monday of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. The X started appearing on the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant across the phone app. Musk had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it “certainly will be refined.” “And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted Sunday. The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said. In response to questions about what tweets would be called when the rebranding is done, Musk said they would be called Xs. Musk, CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated with the letter. The billionaire is also CEO of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal, He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.” Musk’s Twitter purchase and rebranding are part of his strategy to create what he’s dubbed an ” everything app ” similar …

The White House on Friday announced that the Biden administration had reached a voluntary agreement with seven companies building artificial intelligence products to establish guidelines meant to ensure the technology is developed safely. “These commitments are real, and they’re concrete,” President Joe Biden said in comments to reporters. “They’re going to help … the industry fulfill its fundamental obligation to Americans to develop safe, secure and trustworthy technologies that benefit society and uphold our values and our shared values.” The companies that sent leaders to the White House were Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI. The firms are all developing systems called large language models (LLMs), which are trained using vast amounts of text, usually taken from the publicly accessible internet, and use predictive analysis to respond to queries conversationally. In a statement, OpenAI, which created the popular ChatGPT service, said, “This process, coordinated by the White House, is an important step in advancing meaningful and effective AI governance, both in the U.S. and around the world.” Safety, security, trust The agreement, released by the White House on Friday morning, outlines three broad areas of focus: assuring that AI products are safe for public use before they are made widely available; building products that are secure and cannot be misused for unintended purposes; and establishing public trust that the companies developing the technology are transparent about how they work and what information they gather. As part of the agreement, the companies pledged to conduct internal and external security …

Japan and India have signed an agreement for the joint development of semiconductors, in what appears to be another indication of how global businesses are reconfiguring post-pandemic supply chains as China loses its allure for foreign companies. India’s Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for railways, communications, and electronics and information technology, and Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry, Yasutoshi Nishimura, signed the deal Thursday in New Delhi. The memorandum covers “semiconductor design, manufacturing, equipment research, talent development and [will] bring resilience in the semiconductor supply chain,” Vaishnaw said. Nishimura said after his meeting with Vaishnaw that “India has excellent human resources” in fields such as semiconductor design. “By capitalizing on each other’s strengths, we want to push forward with concrete projects as early as possible,” Nishimura told a news conference, Kyodo News reported.   Andreas Kuehn, a senior fellow at the American office of Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank, told VOA Mandarin: “Japan has extensive experience in this industry and understands the infrastructure in this field at a broad level. It can be an important partner in advancing India’s semiconductor ambitions.” Shift from China Foreign companies have been shifting their manufacturing away from China over the past decade, prompted by increasing labor costs. More recently, Beijing’s push for foreign companies to share their technologies and data has increased uneasiness with China’s business climate, according to surveys of U.S. and European businesses there. The discomfort stems from a 2021 data security law that Beijing updated in April and put into …

Intel Corp. has introduced a processor in China that is designed for AI deep-learning applications despite reports of the Biden administration considering additional restrictions on Chinese companies to address loopholes in chip export controls. The chip giant’s product launch on July 11 is part of an effort by U.S. technology companies to bypass or curb government export controls to the Chinese market as the U.S. government, citing national security concerns, continues to tighten restrictions on China’s artificial intelligence industry. CEOs of U.S. chipmakers including Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia met with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday to urge a halt to more controls on chip exports to China, Reuters reported. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Economic Council director Lael Brainard and White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan were among other government officials meeting with the CEOs, Reuters said. The meeting came after China announced restrictions on the export of materials that are used to construct chips, a response to escalating efforts by Washington to curb China’s technological advances. VOA Mandarin contacted the U.S. chipmakers for comment but has yet to receive responses. Reuters reported Nvidia Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in June that “over the long term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our data center graphic processing units to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for the U.S. industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results.” Before the meeting with …

Artificial intelligence was the dominant topic at the United Nations Security Council this week. In his opening remarks at the session, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “AI will have an impact on every area of our lives” and advocated for the creation of a “new United Nations entity to support collective efforts to govern this extraordinary technology.” Guterres said “the need for global standards and approaches makes the United Nations the ideal place for this to happen” and urged a joining of forces to “build trust for peace and security.” “We need a race to develop AI for good,” Guterres said. “And that is a race that is possible and achievable.” In his briefing, to the council, Guterres said the debate was an opportunity to consider the impact of artificial intelligence on peace and security “where it is already raising political, legal, ethical and humanitarian concerns.” He also stated that while governments, large companies and organizations around the world are working on an AI strategy, “even its own designers have no idea where their stunning technological breakthrough may lead.” Guterres urged the Security Council “to approach this technology with a sense of urgency, a global lens and a learner’s mindset, because what we have seen is just the beginning.” AI for good and evil The secretary-general’s remarks set the stage for a series of comments and observations by session participants on how artificial intelligence can benefit society in health, education and human rights, while recognizing that, gone unchecked, AI also …

Tayba Hatimy studied and practiced dentistry for seven years before she realized her real passion was caring for the environment. Since then, she has founded a garbage collection app that helps people in Mombasa, Kenya reduce garbage along the coast. Saida Swaleh has the story. (Camera: Moses Baya ) …

Does generative artificial intelligence pose a risk to humanity that could lead to our extinction? That was among the questions put to experts by the head of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission at a workshop hosted with the National Science Foundation. FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said she is more hopeful about artificial intelligence than pessimistic. “That might sound contrarian,” she said, given that so much of the news about AI is “dark,” raising questions such as, “How do we rein in this technology? What does it mean for the future of work when we have intelligent machines? What will it mean for democracy and elections?” The discussion included participants from a range of industries including network operators and vendors, leading academics, federal agencies, and public interest representatives.   “We are entering the AI revolution,” said National Science Foundation senior adviser John Chapin, who described this as a “once-in-a-generation change in technology capabilities” which “require rethinking the fundamental assumptions that underline our communications.”  “It is vital that we bring expert understanding of the science of technology together with expert understanding of the user and regulatory issues.”  Investing in AI  FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington pointed out that while technology may sometimes give the appearance of arriving suddenly, in many cases it’s a product of a steady but unnoticed evolution decades in the making. He gave the example of ChatGPT as AI that landed seemingly overnight, with dramatic impact.  “Where the United States has succeeded in technological development, it has done so through a mindful attempt …

The White House on Tuesday along with companies such as Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet’s Google and Best Buy will announce an initiative that allows Americans to identify devices that are less vulnerable to cyberattacks. A new certification and labeling program would raise the bar for cybersecurity across smart devices such as refrigerators, microwaves, televisions, climate control systems and fitness trackers, the White House said in a statement. Retailers and manufacturers will apply a “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” logo to their devices and the program will be up and running in 2024. The initiative is designed to make sure “our networks and the use of them is more secure, because it is so important for economic and national security,” said a senior administration official, who did not wish to be named. The Federal Communications Commission will seek public comment before rolling out the labeling program and register a national trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the White House said. Other retailers and manufacturers participating in the program include LG Electronics U.S.A., Logitech, Cisco Systems and Samsung. In March, the White House launched its national cyber strategy that called on software makers and companies to take far greater responsibility to ensure that their systems cannot be hacked. It also accelerated efforts by agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Defense Department to disrupt activities of hackers and ransomware groups around the world. Last week, Microsoft and U.S. official said Chinese state-linked hackers secretly accessed email accounts at around …

Norway’s data protection agency said Monday it would ban Facebook and Instagram owner Meta from using the personal information of users for targeted advertising, threatening a $100,000 daily fine if the company continues.  The business practices of big U.S. tech firms are under close scrutiny across Europe over concerns about privacy, with huge fines handed out in recent years.  The Norwegian watchdog, Datatilsynet, said Meta uses information such as the location of users, the content they like and their posts for marketing purposes.  “The Norwegian Data Protection Authority considers that the practice of Meta is illegal and is therefore imposing a temporary ban of behavioural advertising on Facebook and Instagram,” it said in a statement.   The ban will begin on August 4 and last three months to give Meta time to take corrective measures. The company will be fined one million kroner ($100,000) per day if it fails to comply.   “We will analyze the decision … but there is no immediate effect on our services,” Meta told AFP in a statement.  The Norwegian regulator added that its ruling was neither a ban on Facebook and Instagram operating in the country nor a blanket ban on behavioral advertising.  The Austrian digital privacy campaign group noyb, which has lodged a number of complaints against Meta’s activities, said it “welcomes this decision as a first important step” and hopes data regulators in other countries will follow suit.  Meta suffered a major setback earlier this year when European regulators dismissed the legal …

Britain’s financial watchdog on Monday proposed toughening up safeguards against the illegal marketing of financial products on social media by applying a stringent “consumer duty” that is being rolled out to banks, funds and insurers on July 31. The Financial Conduct Authority has said its new duty will be a step change in protecting retail investors after years of mis-selling scandals, by forcing firms to demonstrate how they are giving consumer good outcomes. “Where applicable, the Consumer Duty will raise our expectations of firms communicating financial promotions on social media above the requirement… to be ‘clear, fair and not misleading’,” the FCA said in proposals out to public consultation. “Firms advertising using social media must consider how their marketing strategies align with acting to deliver good outcomes for retail customers.” In the fourth quarter of last year, nearly 70% of amended or withdrawn financial marketing following FCA intervention involved a promotion on websites or social media, the FCA said. The watchdog is targeting so-called ‘finfluencers’ or widely followed people on social media who promote financial products. “Consumers exhibit high levels of trust in finfluencers, but their advice can often be misleading,” the FCA said. “Promoting a regulated financial product or service without approval of an FCA authorized person, or providing financial advice without FCA authorisation, may be a criminal offense.” Promotions should also include risk warnings, it added. …

Elon Musk says Twitter is still losing cash because advertising has dropped by half. In a reply to a tweet offering business advice, Musk tweeted Saturday, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to (about a) 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.” “Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else,” he concluded. Ever since he took over Twitter in a $44 billion deal last fall, Musk has tried to reassure advertisers who were concerned about the ouster of top executives, widespread layoffs and a different approach to content moderation. Some high-profile users who had been banned were allowed back on the site. In April, Musk said most of the advertisers who left had returned and that the company might become cash-flow positive in the second quarter. In May, he hired a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, an NBCUniversal executive with deep ties to the advertising industry. But since then, Twitter has upset some users by imposing new limits on how many tweets they can view in a day, and some users complained that they were locked out of the site. Musk said the restrictions were needed to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data. Twitter got a new competitor this month when Facebook owner Meta launched a text-focused app, Threads, and gained tens of millions of sign-ups in a few days. Twitter responded by threatening legal action. …

The chief executives of Intel Corp and Qualcomm Inc are planning to visit Washington next week to discuss China policy, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The executives plan to hold meetings with U.S. officials to talk about market conditions, export controls and other matters affecting their businesses, one of the sources said. It was not immediately clear whom the executives would meet. Intel and Qualcomm declined to comment, and officials at the White House did not immediately return a request for comment. The sources said other semiconductor CEOs may also be in Washington next week. The sources declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.   U.S. officials are considering tightening export rules affecting high-performance computing chips and shipments to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, sources told Reuters in June. The rules would respectively affect Intel, which is preparing a new artificial intelligence chip that could be shipped to China, and Qualcomm, which has a license to sell chips to Huawei. The Biden administration last October issued a sweeping set of rules designed to freeze China’s semiconductor industry in place while the U.S. pours billions of dollars in subsidies into its own chip industry. The possible rule tightening would hit Nvidia particularly hard. The company’s strong position in the AI chip market helped boost its worth to $1 trillion earlier this year. The chip industry has been warmly received in Washington in recent years as lawmakers and the White House work to …

Microsoft says hackers used a flaw in its code to steal emails from government agencies and other clients.  In a blog post published Friday, the company said that Chinese hackers were able to take advantage of “a validation error in Microsoft code” to carry out their cyberespionage campaign.  The blog provided the most thorough explanation yet for a hack that rattled both the cybersecurity industry and China-U.S. relations. Beijing has denied any involvement in the spying.  Microsoft and U.S. officials said on Wednesday night that since May, Chinese state-linked hackers had been secretly accessing email accounts at about 25 organizations. U.S. officials said those included at least two U.S. government agencies.  Microsoft has not identified any of the hack’s targets, but several victims have acknowledged they were affected, including personnel at the State Department, the Commerce Department and the U.S. House of Representatives.  Secretary of State Antony Blinken told China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in a meeting in Jakarta on Thursday that any action that targets the U.S. government, U.S. companies or American citizens “is of deep concern to us, and that we will take appropriate action to hold those responsible accountable,” according to a senior State Department official.  Microsoft’s own security practices have come under scrutiny, with officials and lawmakers calling on the Redmond, Washington-based company to make its top level of digital auditing, also called logging, available to all its customers free of charge. …

India is set to launch a spacecraft to the moon Friday. If successful, it would make India only the fourth country to do so, after the U.S., the Soviet Union, and China. It will take the $75 million Chandrayaan-3 over a month to reach the moon’s south pole  in August. The south pole is a special place of interest because scientists believe water is present there. Chandrayaan-3’s equipment includes a lander to deploy a rover. Chandrayaan-3 means “moon craft” in Sanskrit. …

Hackers, possibly linked to China’s intelligence agencies, are being blamed for a monthlong campaign that breached some unclassified U.S. email systems, allowing them to access to a small number of accounts at the U.S. State Department and a handful of other organizations. Microsoft first announced the intrusion Tuesday, attributing the attack on its Outlook email service to Chinese threat actors it dubbed Storm-0558. The company said in a blog post that the hackers managed to forge a Microsoft authentication token and gain access to the email accounts of 25 organizations, both in the U.S. and around the globe, starting in mid-May. The company said access was cut off after the breach was discovered a month later. “We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to email systems for intelligence collection,” Microsoft said. “This type of espionage-motivated adversary seeks to abuse credentials and gain access to data residing in sensitive systems.” The State Department confirmed Wednesday that it had discovered the breach and had taken “immediate steps” to secure its systems and to notify Microsoft. Some U.S. officials, however, were hesitant to back Microsoft’s attribution for the attack while saying the U.S. “would make all efforts to impose costs” on whoever was responsible. “The sophistication of this attack, where actors were able to access mailbox content of victims, is indicative of APT [advanced persistent threat] activity but we are not prepared to discuss attribution at a more specific level,” a senior FBI official told reporters Wednesday, briefing them …

U.S. tech titan Mark Zuckerberg has plunged into a high-stakes game of brinkmanship with the European Union by withholding his new Threads app from users in Europe, but analysts say he will struggle to win the fight. Threads, billed as the killer of Twitter, a platform that has tumbled into chaos under the leadership of mercurial tycoon Elon Musk, has added more than 100 million users in its first week in app stores. But Zuckerberg’s firm Meta said it could not be released in Europe because of “regulatory uncertainty” around the Digital Markets Act, an antitrust regulation that will not come into force until next year. “The reason they gave made me laugh,” said Diego Naranjo, head of policy at campaign group European Digital Rights. “The regulation is not uncertain, it’s very certain, it’s just that Meta doesn’t like it.”  His theory is that Meta will give Threads to the rest of the world and Europeans will become so vexed at missing out that they will pressure the EU to water down the DMA. Naranjo, for one, thinks the ploy will fail. But either way, the rest of the big tech platforms will be glued to their screens as this fight could shape the future regulatory landscape in Europe for all of them. ‘Fatal’ blow Meta and the rest are already regularly in trouble with EU regulators over their data gathering and retention policies. They struggle to keep to the terms of Europe’s mammoth five-year-old data privacy regulation (GDPR). When …

Meta Platforms’ Twitter rival Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday, dethroning ChatGPT as the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone.  Threads has been setting records for user growth since its launch on Wednesday, with celebrities, politicians and other newsmakers joining the platform seen by analysts as the first serious threat to the Elon Musk-owned microblogging app.  “That’s mostly organic demand, and we haven’t even turned on many promotions yet,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post announcing the milestone.  The app’s sprint to 100 million users was much speedier than that of OpenAI-owned ChatGPT, which became the fastest-growing consumer application in history in January about two months after its launch, according to a UBS study.  Still, Threads has some catching up to do. Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July last year, according to the company’s last public disclosure before Musk’s takeover.  Twitter has responded to Threads’ arrival by threatening to sue Meta, alleging that the social media behemoth used its trade secrets and other confidential information to build the app.  That claim, legal experts say, could be hard to prove.  Threads bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, as do numerous other social media sites that have cropped up in recent months as users have chafed at Musk’s management of the service. It allows posts that are up to 500 characters long and supports links, photos and videos of up to 5 minutes.  The app …

In a world where technology, such as artificial intelligence, is advancing at a rapid pace, what guidance do technology developers have in making the best ethically sound decisions for consumers?  A new handbook, titled “Ethics in the Age of Disruptive Technologies: An Operational Roadmap,” promises to give guidance on such issues as the ethical use of AI chatbots like ChatGPT. The handbook, released June 28, is the first product of the Institute for Technology, Ethics and Culture, or ITEC, the result of a collaboration between Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Vatican’s Center for Digital Culture. The handbook has been in the works for a few years, but the authors said they saw a need to work with a new sense of urgency with the recent escalation of AI usage, following security threats and privacy concerns after the recent release of ChatGPT.      Enter Father Brendan McGuire. McGuire worked in the tech industry, serving as executive director of the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association in the early 1990s, before entering the priesthood about 23 years ago.  McGuire said that over the years, he’s continued to meet with friends from the tech world, many of whom are now leaders in the industry. But, about 10 years ago, their discussions started to get more serious, he said. “They said, ‘What is coming over the hill with AI, it’s amazing, it’s unbelievable. But it’s also frightening if we go down the wrong valley,’” McGuire said. “There’s no mechanism …

HONG KONG — Chinese regulators are fining Ant Group 7.123 billion yuan ($985 million) for violating regulations in its payments and financial services, an indicator that more than two years of scrutiny and crackdown on the firm that led it to scrap its planned public listing may have come to an end. The People’s Bank of China imposed the fine on the financial technology provider on Friday, stating that Ant had violated laws and regulations related to corporate governance, financial consumer protection, participation in business activities of banking and insurance institutions, payment and settlement business, and attending to anti-money laundering obligations. The fine comes more than two years after regulators pulled the plug on Ant Group’s $34.5 billion IPO — which would have been the biggest of its time — in 2020. Since then, the company has been ordered to revamp its business and behave more like a financial holding company, as well as rectify unfair competition in its payments business. “We will comply with the terms of the penalty in all earnestness and sincerity and continue to further enhance our compliance governance,” Ant Group said in a statement. The move is widely seen as wrapping up Beijing’s probe into the firm and allowing Ant to revive its initial public offering. Chinese gaming firm Tencent, which operates messaging app WeChat, also received a 2.99 billion yuan fine ($414 million) for regulatory violations over its payments services, according to the central bank Friday, signaling that the crackdown on the Chinese technology …

Just one day after its launch, Threads, the latest social media network, was blocked by the Islamic Republic, denying access to the Iranian population. This action occurred even though an account had been created for Iran President Ebrahim Raisi on the platform. On Thursday afternoon, Raisi’s user account, under the address raisi.ir, was established on Threads. Within a few hours, by Friday noon, he had garnered 27,000 followers. He has yet to make any posts, apparently because the Presidential Office staff administers Raisi’s social media accounts. As Raisi’s user account debuted on the social media platform, numerous Iranian social media users have voiced concerns regarding restricted access to the platform since Thursday evening. Users have indicated that similar to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, they require a VPN or proxy to connect to Threads.   Journalist Ehsan Bodaghi said on Twitter: “During the election, Mr. Raisi spoke about the importance of people’s online businesses and his 2 million followers on Instagram. After one year, he blocked and filtered all social media platforms, and now, within the initial hours, he has become a member of the social network # Threads, which his own government has filtered. Inconsistency knows no bounds!” Another journalist, Javad Daliri, posted this on Twitter: “Mr. Raisi and Mr. Ghalibaf raced each other to join the new social network # Threads. As a citizen, I have a question: Can one issue filtering orders and be among the first to break the filtering and join? By the way, was joining …

Ukraine has been using drones for reconnaissance and attacks since the start of Russia’18s invasion. But sometimes combat drone operators use them to save civilians — or even capture the enemy. Anna Kosstutschenko went to the Donbas region to find out more. Camera: Pavel Suhodolskiy Produced by: Pavel Suhodolskiy …

Threads, a text-based app built by Meta to rival Twitter, is live. The app, billed as the text version of Meta’s photo-sharing platform Instagram, became available Wednesday night to users in more than 100 countries — including the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan. Despite some early glitches, 30 million people had signed up before noon on Thursday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Threads. New arrivals to the platform include celebrities like Oprah, pop star Shakira and chef Gordon Ramsay — as well as corporate accounts from Taco Bell, Netflix, Spotify, The Washington Post and other media outlets. Threads, which Meta says provides “a new, separate space for real-time updates and public conversations,” arrives at a time when many are looking for Twitter alternatives to escape Elon Musk’s raucous oversight of the platform since acquiring it last year for $44 billion. But Meta’s new app has also raised data privacy concerns and is notably unavailable in the European Union. Here’s what you need to know about Threads. How Can I Use Threads? Threads is now available for download in Apple and Google Android app stores for people in more than 100 countries. Threads was built by the Instagram team, so Instagram users can log into Threads through their Instagram account. Your username and verification status will carry over, according to the platform, but you will also have options to customize other areas of your profile — including whether or not you want to follow the same people that you …