For the first time in years, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is riding a wave of good press for going after a competitor, Sara Fischer and I report.

Why it matters: The perfectly-timed launch of Meta's Twitter copycat app, Threads, is being celebrated as a win by many users who have grown tired of the drama surrounding Twitter under its new owner Elon Musk or who dislike changes Musk has made.

Driving the news: The launch of Threads has been met with open arms by a good chunk of the internet community following months of chaotic product and rule changes at Twitter.

• "I think people have been looking for an alternative that is kind of Twitter-like, but without some of the toxic atmosphere that you have on Twitter now," Gizmodo editor in chief Dan Ackerman told ABC News.
• Users "basically wanted another Twitter, but not owned by Elon Musk," New York Times tech report Mike Isaac said on PBS NewsHour.
• A Republican aide told Axios, "I think this will be the first real Twitter competitor."

State of play: For months Twitter users and advertisers have lamented that the service has become more chaotic and spammy amid rollbacks to content moderation rules that also allowed many previously banned accounts, including those run by white supremacists and neo-Nazis, to return.

• Constant changes to the product, like forcing users to pay for verification and temporarily imposing tweet reading limits, created an opening for Meta and others to offer alternatives.
• "We are definitely focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place," Zuckerberg posted on Threads Wednesday.

Yes, but: The hype cycle around Threads won't last forever, and Meta will inevitably run into the same types of content moderation issues it has faced in the past.

• Already, conservatives are criticizing the app for warning users about following accounts that have posted false information.
• Others are also pointing out that users angry with Musk will now just be handing their data over to Zuckerberg.
• The product's limitations at launch are many: It won't be available in Europe, there's no desktop or web version or support for hashtags, and there's no way to read a feed of posts just from users you follow.

Zoom out: Twitter is also threatening legal action over Threads. A lawyer for Twitter sent Meta a letter alleging misappropriation of Twitter trade secrets amid the hiring of dozens of Twitter employees, as Semafor first reported.

• Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a thread in response to the letter, "No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing."

Be smart: While other Twitter competitors — such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill, Gettr, Truth Social and Post News — have tried to supplant Twitter, none has been able to scale anywhere near as quickly as Threads has done in just one day.

• That's thanks to Meta's decision to make Threads easily accessible to all of its 1 billion+ monthly active Instagram users.

By the numbers: Within hours of launch, Zuckerberg said Threads had more than 30 million people signed up. By Friday morning data from Instagram badges suggested that nearly 65 million people had signed up for the new app.

• By comparison, many of Meta's other copycat apps that have since been shuttered, failed to ever crack more than 1 million users.

Go deeper: Politicians in both parties flock to Twitter rival Threads

New artificial intelligence tools promoted by tech giant Unity will help game developers, not put them out of work, the company's CEO, John Riccitiello, tells Axios Gaming's Stephen Totilo.

Why it matters: Video games have become a premier proving ground for generative AI — and a locus for many anxieties about AI’s potential drawbacks.

• The potential upside: AI could automate game development’s more tedious tasks — including generating starter art and code that developers can then refine — freeing their time for more creative endeavors.
• The potential downside: The tech could prove a time-waster or, worse for developers, could automate tasks so well that managers decide they need fewer workers.

What they're saying: "Some companies will try to make the same game with less to save money," Riccitiello says, acknowledging that AI tools could compel some companies to cut staff. "And other companies are going to try to make a better game with the same or more, now that they’ve got so much more power."

• "My guess is that camp two wins."

Details: Unity has announced two generative AI tools, Muse and Sentis, that it plans to offer developers globally this year.

Muse works a ChatGPT-style bot into the Unity engine, letting developers type in requests and get usable artwork and programming code. Riccitiello's rough math: developers could be five to 10 times more productive with Muse.

Sentis works generative AI directly into games. "You can essentially embed a ChatGPT into an NPC, a character," Riccitiello says.

Be smart: Unity management, like so many tech bosses, is hyped about AI, but the actual proven benefits of it are scant so far.

• It's early days, though gaming is often a proving ground for new tech and games made with AI or that incorporate AI are beginning to make their way to the public.

The intrigue: Riccitiello promises that Unity will do right by creators in terms of the datasets its AI is trained on, acknowledging a swarm of questions about it when Unity's AI plans were announced.

The tech industry skews male, but tech layoffs paint a different picture: A disproportionate percentage of the workers laid off since last fall appear to be women, Axios Markets' Emily Peck reports.

Why it matters: There are fears that the Big Tech layoffs that rocked the industry may set back its yearslong push to diversify.

By the numbers: From October 2022 to June 2023, women made up 45% of laid-off tech employees, according to an analysis of 3,404 workers by Layoffs.fyi, shared with Axios.

• About 55% of laid-off workers were male, the analysis shows. But most industry statistics put the share of male employees in tech at a much higher level, said Roger Lee, the founder of Layoffs.fyi.
• For example: At Meta in 2022: 63% of employees were male, according to the company's data.
• Meta said it does not disclose demographic data around layoffs.

The big picture: Tech layoffs were less "tech-y" than you might realize, hitting hardest the parts of these companies that are typically more female-dominated — like human resources, recruiting and marketing.

Ina's thought bubble: Some in the industry say that tech companies that care about diversity can take steps to mitigate this by paying attention to where they cut jobs. Before closing a particular office, for example, companies might want to consider whether that location has a more diverse employment base.

Read more ... Workers who were laid off during maternity leave say it felt "unfair," struggle to find new jobs

Trading Places

• Several top Binance executives — including its general counsel and strategy chief — have said they are leaving the company, per Fortune. The move is said to be in response to CEO Changpeng Zhao's handling of various government inquiries, including one by the U.S. Justice Department.

ICYMI

• A new New York City law is setting a precedent when it comes to protecting workers from bias when companies use artificial intelligence in hiring, but some experts worry about loopholes. (Axios)
• The U.S. military is testing the use of generative AI trained on classified info for use in decision making. (Bloomberg)

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