Daily Digest — 2026-08-28

Daily Digest — Friday, 28 August 2026

🎫 Head for Points

• Hilton, Marriott and United debit cards now give you points on HMRC spend – for a 0.95% fee

Currensea’s Hilton, Marriott and United debit cards now earn points on HMRC payments, but the transactions carry a 0.95% fee; the value depends on the card and any spend-based rewards you trigger.

• Club Eurostar devalues – let’s look at what is changing

Club Eurostar will raise London redemption prices by 10% from 29 October, while European Thalys redemptions are unchanged; upgrades see the bigger changes.

• Bye bye Club Aspire – No1 Lounges is coming to Terminal 5

Heathrow Terminal 5’s Club Aspire is being rebranded and enlarged as a No1 Lounge, replacing a lounge that has become difficult to access with Priority Pass.

🤖 AI News

The Rundown AI

• The Ox Alpha mystery ends with Z.ai

Z.ai revealed that the anonymous Ox Alpha model is GLM-5.3-Flash: an open-weight, low-cost model whose viral launch the company says ran on Chinese-made chips.

The Neuron

• 😺 Nvidia’s buying Hugging Face for $12.9B

Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9bn, tightening its hold on the AI ecosystem while expanding its already enormous AWS infrastructure partnership.

The Deep View

• Why Chinese models may win AI’s efficiency race

Z.ai’s reveal behind the viral Ox Alpha model is presented as evidence that Chinese labs can deliver competitive AI at far lower inference costs, using Chinese chips and an efficiency-focused design.

Superhuman AI

• The research duo building physics-first AI

Two researchers who declined Jeff Bezos’s Project Prometheus have launched Accelerated Understanding, a physics-first AI lab pursuing models that reason about space and time.