Technology

Chinese authorities announced a fine of nearly $1 billion for financial technology firm Ant Group on Friday, nearly three years after regulators halted the company’s plan for a record-breaking public offering that ushered in a period of intense government scrutiny of technology firms.

The fine announced by China’s top securities regulator is seen as a sign that the authorities are wrapping up investigations into technology firms, bringing to a close a period of tough regulation for the industry. Officials said earlier this year that they would start to relax oversight of tech firms. The 2020 crackdown on Ant was followed by a record $2.8 billion antitrust fine for e-commerce giant Alibaba, Ant’s sister company, and a $1.2 billion penalty for ride sharing service Didi.

Regulators fined Ant and its subsidiaries 7.1 billion renminbi ($985 million), and ordered the company to shut down its crowdfunding platform for medical costs, Xianghubao. Regulators also announced a shift in their focus, because “most of the prominent problems in the financial business of technology giants have been rectified.”

Ant Group said in a statement that it “has been conducting business rectification proactively since 2020” and that it would “comply with the terms of the penalty in all earnestness and sincerity.”

Ant, founded in 2014, is one of the world’s largest online financial tech companies. In November 2020, Chinese authorities halted Ant’s blockbuster initial public offering days before it was set to raise an estimated $34 billion in Hong Kong and Shanghai in what was expected to be the world’s biggest I.P.O.

A month later, Ant was ordered by Chinese regulators to revamp its business. The People’s Bank of China, the country’s central bank, said at the time that Ant had been “indifferent” to the law. The central bank ordered the company to improve transparency, bolster corporate governance and establish a holding company.

The investigation into Ant came after its founder and billionaire entrepreneur, Jack Ma, publicly criticized Chinese regulators in 2020 for stifling innovation and being overly cautious. Then, Mr. Ma, the most prominent Chinese tech entrepreneur, disappeared from the public eye.

Earlier this year, Ant Group said Mr. Ma would give up control of the company. Around the same time, the China’s central bank said that it was nearly finished with its regulatory campaign on Big Tech. Mr. Ma’s recent reappearance in mainland China after spending much of his time overseas has drawn speculation that he may return to a bigger role at Alibaba. Last month, in a shake-up, two longtime executives who helped Mr. Ma found the Alibaba were put in charge of the company.

Alibaba Group said in March that it would become a holding company and restructure the group into six different business units with their own chief executive and board of directors. This decision may help the units complete successful I.P.O.s and also ease Beijing’s concern over the tech giant’s concentration of power and influence.

Ant’s estimated value was cut to about $63.8 billion from $235 billion before its I.P.O. was halted by Chinese authorities in November 2020, according to Bloomberg.

The F.B.I. searched the home of the cryptocurrency executive Jesse Powell in March as part of a criminal investigation into claims that he hacked and cyber-stalked a nonprofit that he founded, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

The investigation focused on an allegation by the nonprofit that Mr. Powell, who also founded the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, had interfered with its computer accounts, blocking access to emails and other messages, the people said. Agents with the F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California have been looking into Mr. Powell since at least last fall, three people with knowledge of the case said.

Agents searched Mr. Powell’s home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and seized electronic devices, according to a person familiar with the search and documents reviewed by The New York Times. Prosecutors have not accused Mr. Powell of any crimes.

Brandon Fox, a lawyer for Mr. Powell, confirmed that he was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Northern California. Mr. Fox said the investigation was focused on the allegations by the arts group, Verge Center for the Arts, and “in no way related to Mr. Powell’s employment or his conduct in the cryptocurrency arena.” He also said Mr. Powell “did nothing wrong.”

A Kraken spokeswoman said the Verge investigation had nothing to do with the company, and that Kraken had no reason to believe that prosecutors were investigating other potential issues.

An F.B.I. representative declined to comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California declined to confirm whether an investigation was underway.

In recent months, federal investigators have cracked down on several of Kraken’s competitors. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX crypto exchange, was charged with fraud last year, while Coinbase and Binance, two of the largest exchanges, face government lawsuits.

A key figure in the early history of crypto, Mr. Powell, 42, built Kraken into the second-largest U.S. crypto exchange behind Coinbase.

His company has faced years of legal scrutiny. In recent months, prosecutors have examined allegations against Kraken and Mr. Powell that were made in a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against the company in 2019, two people familiar with the probe said. In that lawsuit, a former Kraken employee accused the firm of earning revenue from accounts in countries that were under U.S. sanctions, and claimed Kraken’s bank accounts were missing millions of dollars of customer deposits.

The suit was settled in 2021, after a judge dismissed the employee’s claim that his firing was related to the sanctions issue.

Last year, Kraken paid a $360,000 fine to settle Treasury Department charges that it violated sanctions by allowing users in Iran to trade digital currencies. In February, Kraken paid a $30 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission for offering an investment product that the agency said violated securities laws.

Mr. Powell founded Verge, the Sacramento arts group, in 2007. Last year, the group removed him from its board of directors, citing his failure to attend board meetings and violations of the organization’s “guiding principles,” according to court records. The removal took place after an article in The Times detailed Mr. Powell’s efforts to incite debates about race and gender that some Kraken employees found offensive.

After Mr. Powell’s dismissal, he blocked Verge from using its website, emails and internal messaging system, and improperly accessed confidential information stored in those accounts, according to a letter that Verge’s lawyer, Phillip Cunningham, sent to Kraken in November. The letter was reviewed by The Times.

Last month, Mr. Powell sued Verge in state court in Sacramento, claiming his ouster was improper and that he owned Verge’s digital accounts. Mr. Cunningham, Verge’s lawyer, said Mr. Powell’s claims did not have any merit.

In September, Mr. Powell announced he would step down as Kraken’s chief executive while remaining chairman. He was replaced by Dave Ripley, Kraken’s chief operating officer, who took over the firm in March.

Kirsten Noyes and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Two hours after pressing the launch button on Wednesday on Threads, Instagram’s new app for real-time, public conversations, Mark Zuckerberg posted that more than two million people had downloaded his latest creation.

That was just the beginning.

Another two hours later, five million people had downloaded Threads. By the time Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, went to bed on Wednesday night, the number of downloads had soared to 10 million. When he woke on Thursday morning, the app had been downloaded more than 30 million times, he said.

In less than a day, Threads — which is aimed as a rival to Twitter — appears to have taken the crown as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. It easily outstripped ChatGPT, the chatbot, which was downloaded one million times within its first five days, according to OpenAI, ChatGPT’s maker. And Threads is on pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similarweb.

Some of Twitter’s most-followed users — such as Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey — immediately joined Threads and began posting. The atmosphere was celebratory, with users writing welcome messages and expressing eagerness to read one another’s posts. At one point, the new app was so inundated with users that it appeared unstable.

“This is as good of a start as we could have hoped for!” Mr. Zuckerberg, whose company owns Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp, said in a post on Threads on Thursday. He later added, “Feels like the beginning of something special.”

The early momentum underscored people’s desire to find an alternative to Twitter, the 17-year-old digital town square that has long been the central place for public conversation online. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, the billionaire has instituted changes that have angered the social platform’s longtime users, especially those who do not care for his laissez-faire approach to content moderation. Twitter has also suffered from more outages and bugs.

Mr. Musk isn’t taking Mr. Zuckerberg’s actions lying down. In a letter dated Wednesday, lawyers for Twitter threatened legal action against Meta, accusing it of using trade secrets from its former employees to build Threads. Twitter also asked Meta to preserve internal documents relevant to a dispute between the two companies. The letter was earlier reported by Semafor.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Thursday.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, also jabbed at Mr. Zuckerberg’s new app. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 7 Twitter clones,” he tweeted on Thursday.

In a post to Threads, Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said that no former Twitter engineers were working on Threads. “That’s just not a thing,” he wrote.

Threads was a surprise hit for Meta, which has been badly in need of a win after being scrutinized for spreading misinformation and other toxic content across the internet. While Mr. Zuckerberg’s social network was celebrated in its early days, it has in recent years been criticized by regulators, activists and users upset with how the company handles data and its products. Meta has also faced questions about its move into the still-emerging immersive digital world of the so-called metaverse.

But this week was a reprieve — at least briefly — for Mr. Zuckerberg and his company. Inside Meta on Wednesday evening, employees rejoiced in the launch of Threads, sharing inside jokes and memes with one another, according to screenshots of the conversations viewed by The New York Times.

One employee noted that morale was soaring internally after a year of layoffs and retrenching at the company. Another shared a meme of two characters from the 1999 film “The Mummy,” telling one another that Twitter has been “replaced by Meta,” according to a screenshot.

Threads was a crash project that spun out of Instagram seven months ago, after the company decided it wanted to “make a bet” and take on Twitter, said Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.

The project, code-named “Project 92,” was a closely held secret, two people familiar with the project said. The team was small and other parts of Meta did not have access to initial versions of the app, they said.

Celebrities, brands and influencers were given early access to the app over the past few days, a move by Meta to kick-start a freewheeling culture of fun and discussion. Mr. Mosseri said that he wanted Threads to be a “friendly place” for public conversation.

“Can’t get enough of your threads,” the actress Jennifer Lopez said in a Threads post, adding an emoji of musical notes. Ms. DeGeneres, in her first Threads post, wrote, “Welcome to Gay Twitter!”

Yet such early momentum does not necessarily translate to long-term engagement and success. Twitter still has the lead, with more than 237 million daily users, according to the most recent public figures cited by the company last year. Meta also continues to face questions about its data privacy policies.

Some Threads users were also put off by an issue that may require them to delete their connected Instagram account if they wish to delete their Threads account. Instagram said it was looking into alternate ways that Threads users can deactivate their accounts.

Instagram appears to be taking a hands-on approach to what can and can’t be posted to Threads to create a “friendly” app for conversations, Mr. Zuckerberg has said.

Across the app, Threads obscured some posts behind a warning box indicating that the content was “reviewed by independent fact checkers” and ruled misleading. Users could click a button on the warning box to reveal the content. An additional pop-up box included a brief explanation about why the content was hidden and a link to a post by the fact checkers who made the ruling.

Threads also appeared to hide some comments entirely. Tomi Lahren, a right-wing influencer, asked in her first post on the app, “Will Meta be censoring conservative thought here too?” — a jab against mainstream social networks that have moderated false and misleading content in the past. At the bottom of the comments section on her post, a label appeared that read: “Some replies aren’t available.”

Another warning appeared when users tried to follow some influencers that Meta had previously flagged for publishing false or misleading content.

“Are you sure you want to follow” the person, the warning asked. “This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or went against our Community Guidelines.” The same warning appeared during attempts to follow those users’ Instagram profiles.

For new Threads users like Kate Stone, a 63-year-old lawyer in North Carolina, having proper content moderation is important. She had a dormant Twitter account and had once dreamed of owning a Tesla, the electric cars made by Mr. Musk, but had given up on both when the tech billionaire began tweeting more politically conservative messages. But she wanted to be part of the public conversation online, and she thought Threads might be a way to do that.

“I read about Threads, and I don’t like Zuckerberg very much, but I saw it was easy to do if you have an Instagram account,” Ms. Stone said in an interview. “So I thought I’d give it a try.”

Stuart A. Thompson and Cade Metz contributed reporting.

The tech industry loves its garage start-up stories. From Hewlett-Packard to Google, the tales of bootstrapped companies that have turned into giants has inspired generations of entrepreneurs.

But the huge amounts of money and computing power needed for start-ups trying to make a go of it with today’s hottest technology, the artificial intelligence used in chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard, may be making those inspirational tales a thing of the past.

In 2019, Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst left Google to create an A.I. start-up in Toronto called Cohere that could compete with their former employer. Several months later, they went back to Google and asked if it would sell them the enormous computing power they would need to build their own A.I. technology. After Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, personally approved the arrangement, the tech giant gave them what they wanted.

“It’s ‘Game of Thrones.’ That’s what it is,” said David Katz, a partner with Radical Ventures, Cohere’s first investor. The big companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon, he added, are controlling the chips. “They’re controlling the computing power,” he said. “They are selecting who gets it.”

Building a groundbreaking A.I. start-up is difficult without getting the support of “the hyperscalers,” which control the vast data centers capable of running A.I. systems. And that has put the industry’s giants in the driver’s seat — again — for what many expect to be the most important shift for the tech industry in decades.

OpenAI, the start-up behind ChatGPT, recently raised $10 billion from Microsoft. It will pump most of that money back into Microsoft as it pays for time on the massive clusters of computer servers operated by the bigger company. Spanning thousands of specialized computer chips, these machines are essential to improving and expanding the skills of ChatGPT and similar technologies.

Competitors cannot keep pace with OpenAI unless they get their hands on similar amounts of computing power. Cohere recently raised $270 million, bringing its total funding to more than $440 million. It will use much of that money to buy computing power from the likes of Google.

Other start-ups have made similar arrangements, most notably a Silicon Valley company called Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers; Character.AI, founded by two leading researchers from Google; and Inflection AI, founded by a former Google executive. Inflection raised a $1.3 billion funding round last week, bringing its total to $1.5 billion.

At Google, Mr. Gomez was part of a small research team that designed the Transformer, the fundamental technology used to create chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

The Transformer is a powerful example of what scientists call a neural network — a mathematical system that can learn skills by analyzing data. Neural networks have been around for years, helping to drive everything from talking digital assistants like Siri to instant translation services like Google Translate.

The Transformer took the idea into new territory. Running across hundreds or even thousands of computer chips, it could analyze far more data, far more quickly.

Using this technology, companies like Google and OpenAI began building systems that learned from enormous amounts of digital text, including Wikipedia articles, digital books and chat logs. As these systems analyzed more and more data, they learned to generate text on their own, including term papers, blog posts, poetry and computer code.

These systems — called large language models — now underpin chatbots like Google Bard and ChatGPT.

Well before the arrival of ChatGPT, Mr. Gomez left Google to start his own company alongside Mr. Frosst and another Toronto entrepreneur, Ivan Zhang. The aim was to build large language models rivaling Google’s.

At Google, he and his fellow researchers had access to nearly unlimited amounts of computing power. After leaving the company, he needed something similar. So he and his co-founders purchased it from Google, which sells access to the same chips through cloud computing services.

Over the next three years, Cohere built a large language model that rivals almost any other. Now, it is selling this technology to other businesses. The idea is to provide any company with the technology they need to build and run their own A.I. applications, from chatbots to search engines to personal tutors.

“The strategy is to build a platform that others can build off of and experiment with,” Mr. Gomez said.

OpenAI offers a service along the same lines called GPT-4, which many businesses are already using to build chatbots and other applications. This new technology can analyze, generate and edit text. But it will soon handle images and sounds as well. OpenAI is preparing a version of GPT-4 that can examine a photograph, instantly describe it and even answer questions about it.

Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said the company’s arrangement with OpenAI is the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that it has long nurtured with smaller competitors. “I grew up in a company that has always done these types of deals with other companies,” he told The New York Times earlier this year.

As the industry races to match GPT-4, entrepreneurs, investors and pundits are debating who will be the eventual winners. Most agree that OpenAI is leading the field. But Cohere and a small group of other companies are building similar technology.

The tech giants are in a strong position because they have the vast resources needed to push these systems further than anyone else. Google also holds a patent on the Transformer, the foundational technology behind the A.I. systems that Cohere and many other companies are building.

But there is a wild card: Open source software.

Meta, another giant with the computing power needed to build the next wave of A.I., recently open sourced its latest large language model, meaning anyone can reuse it and build on top of it. Many in the field believe this kind of freely available software will allow anyone to compete.

“Having the collective minds of every researchers on Earth would beat any company,” said Amr Awadallah, chief executive of the A.I. start-up Vectara and a former Google executive. But they’ll still need to pay for access to a much larger competitor’s data centers.

Earlier this year, Mark Austin, the vice president of data science at AT&T, noticed that some of the company’s developers had started using the ChatGPT chatbot at work. When the developers got stuck, they asked ChatGPT to explain, fix or hone their code.

It seemed to be a game-changer, Mr. Austin said. But since ChatGPT is a publicly available tool, he wondered if it was secure for businesses to use.

So in January, AT&T tried a product from Microsoft called Azure OpenAI Services that lets businesses build their own A.I.-powered chatbots. AT&T used it to create a proprietary A.I. assistant, Ask AT&T, which helps its developers automate their coding process. AT&T’s customer service representatives also began using the chatbot to help summarize their calls, among other tasks.

“Once they realize what it can do, they love it,” Mr. Austin said. Forms that once took hours to complete needed only two minutes with Ask AT&T so employees could focus on more complicated tasks, he said, and developers who used the chatbot increased their productivity by 20 to 50 percent.

AT&T is one of many businesses eager to find ways to tap the power of generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers chatbots and that has gripped Silicon Valley with excitement in recent months. Generative A.I. can produce its own text, photos and video in response to prompts, capabilities that can help automate tasks such as taking meeting minutes and cut down on paperwork.

To meet this new demand, tech companies are racing to introduce products for businesses that incorporate generative A.I. Over the past three months, Amazon, Box and Cisco have unveiled plans for generative A.I.-powered products that produce code, analyze documents and summarize meetings. Salesforce also recently rolled out generative A.I. products used in sales, marketing and its Slack messaging service, while Oracle announced a new A.I. feature for human resources teams.

These companies are also investing more in A.I. development. In May, Oracle and Salesforce Ventures, the venture capital arm of Salesforce, invested in Cohere, a Toronto start-up focused on generative A.I. for business use. Oracle is also reselling Cohere’s technology.

“I think this is a complete breakthrough in enterprise software,” Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, said of generative A.I. He called it “this incredibly exciting opportunity where, for the first time ever, you can actually start to understand what’s inside of your data in a way that wasn’t possible before.”

Many of these tech companies are following Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In January, Microsoft made Azure OpenAI Service available to customers, who can then access OpenAI’s technology to build their own versions of ChatGPT. As of May, the service had 4,500 customers, said John Montgomery, a Microsoft corporate vice president.

For the most part, tech companies are now rolling out four kinds of generative A.I. products for businesses: features and services that generate code for software engineers, create new content such as sales emails and product descriptions for marketing teams, search company data to answer employee questions, and summarize meeting notes and lengthy documents.

“It is going to be a tool that is used by people to accomplish what they are already doing,” said Bern Elliot, a vice president and analyst at the I.T. research and consulting firm Gartner.

But using generative A.I. in workplaces has risks. Chatbots can produce inaccuracies and misinformation, provide inappropriate responses and leak data. A.I. remains largely unregulated.

In response to these issues, tech companies have taken some steps. To prevent data leakage and to enhance security, some have engineered generative A.I. products so they do not keep a customer’s data.

When Salesforce last month introduced AI Cloud, a service with nine generative A.I.-powered products for businesses, the company included a “trust layer” to help mask sensitive corporate information to stop leaks and promised that what users typed into these products would not be used to retrain the underlying A.I. model.

Similarly, Oracle said that customer data would be kept in a secure environment while training its A.I. model and added that it would not be able to see the information.

Salesforce offers AI Cloud starting at $360,000 annually, with the cost rising depending on the amount of usage. Microsoft charges for Azure OpenAI Service based on the version of OpenAI technology that a customer chooses, as well as the amount of usage.

For now, generative A.I. is used mainly in workplace scenarios that carry low risks — instead of highly regulated industries — with a human in the loop, said Beena Ammanath, the executive director of the Deloitte A.I. Institute, a research center of the consulting firm. A recent Gartner survey of 43 companies found that over half the respondents have no internal policy on generative A.I.

“It is not just about being able to use these new tools efficiently, but it is also about preparing your work force for the new kinds of work that might evolve,” Ms. Ammanath said. “There is going to be new skills needed.”

Panasonic Connect, part of the Japanese electronics company Panasonic, began using Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service to make its own chatbot in February. Today, its employees ask the chatbot 5,000 questions a day about everything from drafting emails to writing code.

While Panasonic Connect had expected its engineers to be the main users of the chatbot, other departments — such as legal, accounting and quality assurance — also turned to it to help summarize legal documents, brainstorm solutions to improve product quality and other tasks, said Judah Reynolds, Panasonic Connect’s marketing and communications chief.

“Everyone started using it in ways that we didn’t even foresee ourselves,” he said. “So people are really taking advantage of it.”

After months of speculation and secrecy, Mark Zuckerberg’s long-rumored competitor app to Twitter is here.

The new app, Threads, was unveiled on Wednesday as a companion to Instagram, the popular photo-sharing network that Mr. Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, bought more than a decade ago. If Instagram executives get their way, Threads will also replace rival Twitter, with some techies referring to it as a “Twitter killer.”

The rollout of Threads ramps up the rivalry between Mr. Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last year. Mr. Musk has changed the experience of Twitter by tinkering with its algorithm and other features, and most recently imposed temporary limits on how many tweets people could read when using the app, inciting outrage.

Many tech companies have tried capitalizing on Twitter’s turmoil in recent months. But Threads has a leg up, backed by Meta’s deep pockets and Instagram’s enormous user base of more than two billion monthly active users around the world.

In a post to his Threads account on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said: “I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.” He said that Threads achieved 5 million sign-ups within four hours of its launch.

Mr. Musk weighed in, saying he was not impressed by Threads and claiming he had canceled his Instagram account. “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he wrote on Twitter.

Here’s what to know about Threads.

What is Threads and how does it work?

Built by Instagram, Threads is positioned as an app where people can have real-time, public conversations with one another. Threads also helps boost Instagram, which is a marquee app in Meta’s family of products.

“The idea is to hopefully build an open, friendly space for communities,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in an interview.

Instagram has tied Threads closely to itself. Those interested in signing up for the new app are required to have an Instagram account for now. A user’s Instagram handle must also be their Threads user name.

And people will be able to directly import the list of those they follow on Instagram to Threads if they wish. Instagram’s verified users will also be verified on the new app. Users can set their Threads account to be private or public.

How is Threads similar to or different from Twitter?

Threads looks nearly identical to Twitter in many ways. Users can post mostly text-based messages to a scrolling feed, where people who follow them and whom they follow can reply. People can also post photos or video to the app.

But Threads is also different from Twitter. It does not currently support direct messaging, a feature that Twitter offers. Instagram said it may add features to Threads if new users ask for them.

How did Instagram come up with Threads?

Instagram has made a concerted effort to simplify its app over the past few years, Mr. Mosseri said. As part of that effort, he said, Threads was spun out into a separate app. That way, Instagram would not be too cluttered by trying to make public conversations work inside its existing app.

The choice to create a new app was also hard to resist, Mr. Mosseri added, especially at a tumultuous moment in the social media landscape.

“There was an opportunity or demand for more people to play in the public space,” he said, referring to the changes around Twitter under Mr. Musk. Mr. Mosseri added that the chance to challenge Twitter came about “not just because of the ownership, but because of product changes and decisions” that Mr. Musk and others made to how the social platform works.

Instagram began its effort to take on Twitter late last year, with dozens of engineers, product managers and designers pitching ideas on what a rival app could look like. Among the notions Meta’s workers talked over at the time was a more extensive rollout of a feature called Instagram Notes, where people can share short messages on the site, and a text-focused app using Instagram’s technology.

Ultimately, Mr. Mosseri said, he and other managers decided they should “make a bet” on a messaging app and leaned into building what became Threads.

How will Threads work with other apps?

Instagram’s goal is to ultimately have Threads work across multiple apps in what it calls the Fediverse, which is shorthand for a federated universe of services that share communication protocols. Other apps like Mastodon, another social network, also function in this way.

This might sound like a lot of tech speak. What it means, essentially, is that Instagram wants to make it easier for Threads to operate seamlessly with other platforms, which could appeal to creators and influencers so they do not have to start from scratch on each app.

If a creator builds up a sizable number of followers on Threads, for instance, they could ostensibly take those followers with them to other platforms that are built on the same technology. That would make it less risky for creators and could free them from feeling like they are “stuck” on one platform, Mr. Mosseri said.

Has Instagram cloned other apps?

Mr. Zuckerberg’s Meta, which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, has an extensive history of trying to stamp out social media rivals, partly by copying their features. Mr. Zuckerberg is fiercely competitive and has long wanted to own a product that accomplishes what Twitter does.

That strategy does not always guarantee success. Facebook’s early attempts to clone the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat, for example, did not initially gain much traction.

Even so, Meta has continued to imitate rivals. In 2020, Meta released a TikTok copycat called Reels, which focuses on short videos and has since become widely used.

Where will Threads be available?

Threads is available for download for free from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store in the United States and roughly 100 other countries beginning on Wednesday. It has plans to expand further.

But Meta said Threads will not initially be available in the European Union, one of the company’s largest markets. A new E.U. law called the Digital Markets Act is taking effect in the coming months and limits how the largest tech companies share data across services. Meta said it was waiting to get more specifics about the law’s implementation before introducing Threads across the 27-nation bloc.

Adam Satariano contributed reporting.