Steve Nash, who has met me at a court in Manhattan Beach on a cloudy Monday afternoon to shoot free throws, glances over and chuckles at his miss. "It's been a while," he says. When he retired from the NBA in 2015, Nash, a two-time MVP, left with a career average 90.43 percent from the line--the highest in league history. But he hasn't worked on his foul shot since. For an instant, I feel anxious for him.

A coach is indispensable to the serious athlete -- everyone from Olympians to up-and-coming youth athletes needs experts who can spot the strengths and weaknesses of an athlete's style and cater to their personal needs. But now AI systems are almost sophisticated enough to do the job just as well as -- better in some ways -- than the old human experts. HomeCourt, an iPhone app that basketball players can use to track their shots, might be the first of its kind. If the phone's camera is propped up and aimed at them while they practice, the app will track the position and success rate of each throw. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the free app offers users real-time feedback, complete with an automatically-spliced video recording of every single shot the athlete takes so they can check their form. At least, it does for 300 shots per month -- more than that, and a user is prompted to pay $8 for a subscription.

There is nothing unusual about how little he knows about his own history. Almost everyone in the NBA today came of age in the final years that sports were more art than science. But the game has been transformed since then. A technological revolution has swept through basketball and made it possible for high-schoolers to have more data about themselves than even the most progressive NBA teams had until recently. Lin is now an investor in the latest product that's spreading through the sport and getting attention from the league's brightest minds, a new app called HomeCourt, which comes from a tech company focused on mobile artificial intelligence that was founded not long ago by former Apple engineers who were obsessed with basketball and have spent the last year developing the sort of weapon that Jeremy Lin never had.

Let's be real: you are most certainly never going to be as good as Steve Nash, Chris Paul, James Harden -- or really any professional NBA player. But it probably won't stop you from trying to practice or model your game around your favorite players, and spend hours upon hours figuring out how to get better. And while there are going to be plenty of attempts to smash image recognition and AI into that problem, a company called NEX Team is hoping to soften the blow a bit by helping casual players figure out their game, rather than trying to be as good as a professional NBA player. Using phone cameras and image recognition on the back end, its primary app HomeCourt will measure a variety of variables like shot trajectory, jump height, and body position, and help understand how to improve a player's shooting form. It's not designed to help that player shoot like Ray Allen, but at least start hitting those mid-range jumpers.

There is nothing unusual about how little he knows about his own history. Almost everyone in the NBA today came of age in the final years that sports were more art than science. But the game has been transformed since then. A technological revolution has swept through basketball and made it possible for high-schoolers to have more data about themselves than even the most progressive NBA teams had until recently. Lin is now an investor in the latest product that's spreading through the sport and getting attention from the league's brightest minds, a new app called HomeCourt, which comes from a tech company focused on mobile artificial intelligence that was founded not long ago by former Apple engineers who were obsessed with basketball and have spent the last year developing the sort of weapon that Jeremy Lin never had.

Apple describes its mobile devices as designed in California and assembled in China. You could also say they were made by the App Store, launched a decade ago next month, a year after the first iPhone. Inviting outsiders to craft useful, entertaining, or even puerile extensions to the iPhone's capabilities transformed the device into the era-defining franchise that enabled Uber and Snapchat. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, is tasked with keeping that wellspring of new ideas flowing. One of his main strategies is to get more app developers to use artificial intelligence tools such as recognizing objects in front of an iPhone's camera. The hope is that will spawn a new generation of ideas from Apple's ecosystem of outsourced innovation.

Apple describes its mobile devices as designed in California and assembled in China. You could also say they were made by the App Store, launched a decade ago next month, a year after the first iPhone. Inviting outsiders to craft useful, entertaining, or even peurile extensions to the iPhone's capabilities transformed the device into the era-defining franchise that enabled Uber and Snapchat. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, is tasked with keeping that wellspring of new ideas flowing. One of his main strategies is to get more app developers to use artificial intelligence tools such as recognizing objects in front of an iPhone's camera. The hope is that will spawn a new generation of ideas from Apple's ecosystem of outsourced innovation.