Business Insider: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cuts $5.1B in IT and consulting contracts, such as with Accenture, Deloitte, and Booz Allen, calling them “wasteful spending”  —  – US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered cuts at the Pentagon including some consulting contracts. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Reuters: China’s retail giants launch initiatives to help Chinese exporters pivot to the domestic market in response to the US trade war; JD.com launched a ~$27.35B fund  —  China’s retail giants have launched initiatives in the past few days aimed at helping Chinese exporters pivot to the domestic market, as a U.S.-China trade war intensifies. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Ellen O’Regan / Politico: Ireland’s DPC opens an investigation into how personal data in public X posts was used to train xAI’s Grok, which could stoke tensions between the EU and the US  —  The investigation threatens to stoke further tensions between the EU and U.S. over tech rules. Lees verder op Tech Meme

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch: OpenAI will retire GPT-4, launched over two years ago, from ChatGPT on April 30, to be “fully replaced” by GPT-4o; GPT-4 will remain available in OpenAI’s API  —  OpenAI will soon retire GPT-4, an AI model it launched over two years ago, from ChatGPT, according to a changelog posted on Thursday. Lees verder op Tech Meme