People might have had to wait a whole year for the iPhone X -- if Apple had stuck to its original plan. Executives of the Cupertino company revealed in an interview with Mashable Apple had initially intended to release the new iPhone X next year. Dan Riccio, Apple's SVP of hardware engineering, said the iPhone X with facial recognition technology and edge-to-edge OLED was supposed to release next year, but "with a lot of hard work, talent, grit, and determination" the company was able to offer the device to consumers this fall. It was also a risky move, since Apple was on a tight deadline. "We all knew where we were going," said Craig Federighi, Apple SVP of software engineering, "but there were a dozen things we knew we had to solve, and any one of them could have failed to come together."

The 49th Sveriges Riksbank prize in economic sciences – commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize for economics – has been awarded to Richard H Thaler for his contributions to behavioural economics. He was a key proponent of the idea that humans do not act entirely rationally and is primarily known for his often misunderstood concept of Nudge Theory. Attributed to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book "Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness," a "Nudge" can change the behaviour or decision that a human will make. The basis of Nudge theory is to apply an understanding of predicted behaviours to shape and influence that automated process. Leveraging a variety of different strategies, such as default settings, information as an incentive and right context, companies have proven the ability to change someone's behaviour through a successful Nudge.

Microsoft hopes to take a dedicated AI chip that it's building into the next generation of its HoloLens augmented-reality headset and push it into other hardware, presumably PCs and devices built by other countries. Speaking to CNBC, Microsoft's device chief Panos Panay said the company continues to work on an AI chipset for the next generation of the HoloLens, which so far has been sold primarily to commercial partners. According to Panay, Microsoft is poised to expand sales of the HoloLens from 10 markets to a total of 39, adding 29 new markets across Western Europe. Microsoft disclosed that it was building the new AI chipset in July, though it was unclear what functions the chipset would handle. Microsoft said then that the more traditional approaches used in the original HoloLens and other devices enhanced existing cloud computing fabrics, but that it was seeking to develop a more independent chip that could be used either online or offline.

On October 23, Doppler Labs founder Noah Kraft got a Facebook notification. One of those "On This Day" pop-ups, resurfacing a post from exactly two years ago, when Kraft had appeared on CNBC to make the case for his company. "We want to put a computer, speaker, and mic in everyone's ear," Kraft said during the interview. "We have very lofty visions of the future, everything from real-time translation to personal assistants." Because on October 23, Kraft was nine days away from shutting down Doppler Labs for good.

When Brandon Araki arrived at MIT in 2015 as a master's candidate in mechanical engineering, he brought along the picobug, a tiny robot that can fly, crawl, and grasp small objects. Before Araki joined Daniela Rus's Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL), he'd been working with collaborators at several universities on the diminutive autonomous machine, which weighs 30 grams and fits in the palm of his hand. He wasn't quite sure what he might do next with the picobug, but when his new boss watched it in action, she was smitten. "I want a hundred of them!" Rus said. Rus, who doubles as the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), imagines a future packed with autonomous machines capable of flying, driving, performing simple surgeries, and more.

We hear a lot these days about how AI is changing the marketing technology landscape, helping us sell products and services in the 21st century. But during my two-week journey through Israel's startup scene, it was a medtech company that struck a nerve with me -- a deep learning imaging analytics startup called Zebra Medical Vision. Using AI to recommend related products, build a million split tests, or determine the optimal time to push a discount voucher may be effective from a marketing standpoint, but these applications are hardly life-changing. And they wouldn't have helped save my dad's life. He passed away from lung cancer in February this year, and there is a good chance that an early and accurate diagnosis could have given him a better chance at beating "the big C." Zebra's technology is making it possible to catch misdiagnosed diseases, early-stage cancers, and other life-threatening ailments, and the company today announced a significant change in its business model that makes its AI-powered medical scan recognition for hospitals more affordable.

Yann LeCun is one of AI's most accomplished minds, so when he says that even recent advances in the field aren't taking us closer to super-intelligent machines, you need to pay attention. LeCun has been working in AI for decades, and is one of the co-creators of convolutional neural networks -- a type of program that's proved particularly adept at analyzing visual data, and powers everything from self-driving cars to facial recognition. Now, as head of Facebook's AI research facility FAIR, he helps AI make the journey from the lab to the real world. His team's software automatically captions photos for blind users and performs 4.5 billion AI-powered translations a day. "We had a bigger impact on products than Mark Zuckerberg expected," LeCun told The Verge over Skype recently.

The co-founder of online education platform Coursera has made it his mission to build talent for AI through his new project, deeplearning.ai. Andrew is preparing courses on deep-learning--advanced AI inspired by the human brain's neural networks--that will be available on Coursera. In an interview with ET's J Vignesh, the former chief scientist at Baidu also spoke about how technology disruption can help countries like India leapfrog and take a lead in the new world. Edited excerpts: How are we progressing towards the concept of singularity, or general intelligence, from sector-specific artificial intelligence? That is hard to project.

Apoorv Saxena, lead product manager at Google and co-founder of the AI Frontiers conference that will be held in Santa Clara, Calif., from November 3-5, speaks with Knowledge@Wharton about why interest in artificial intelligence is growing, what is likely to happen in the near future and which challenges will take longer to overcome. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge@Wharton: Interest in artificial intelligence has picked up dramatically in recent times. What is driving this hype? What are some of the biggest prevailing misconceptions about AI and how would you separate the hype from reality? Apoorv Saxena: There are multiple factors driving strong interest in AI recently. First is significant gains in dealing with long-standing problems in AI.

The Kinect is officially dead. But the reality is that Microsoft signed the do-all sensor's fate years ago. Faced with slumping hardware sales in 2014, then-new Xbox chief Phil Spencer had a decision to make. Either Microsoft would drop the price of the Xbox One, or continue letting Sony and the $400 PlayStation 4 eat its lunch. So it stopped bundling the Kinect with the console and cut $100 off the asking price.