World Solve

Independent software developers and small studios can lose significant revenue to piracy networks that distribute their work without payment, and enforcement remains difficult and inconsistent across different countries. Protecting smaller creators specifically remains an underaddressed issue.

Automated captioning has improved significantly but still performs unevenly across different accents, dialects, and less common languages, leaving some users with far less accurate accessibility support than others. Closing this accuracy gap remains incomplete.

Implanted medical devices like pacemakers increasingly connect wirelessly for monitoring, but security protections for these devices haven't kept pace with the sensitivity of what's at stake if they're compromised. Closing this gap remains an urgent but underaddressed challenge.

Blockchain can record ownership transactions, but it doesn't inherently verify that the underlying digital artwork itself is original or hasn't been duplicated elsewhere. Solving this deeper authenticity verification remains an unresolved technical gap.

AI can now generate entirely fake but convincing photos and personas used to build fraudulent romantic or social relationships online for financial exploitation. Detecting and removing these fake profiles quickly enough remains an unresolved platform challenge.

Consumer drones have become cheap and widely available, but affordable detection systems for identifying unauthorized or suspicious drone activity in sensitive areas remain limited. Closing this security gap remains an unresolved technical and regulatory challenge.

Companies sometimes stop providing security patches for older but still commonly used software or devices, leaving users vulnerable without clear warning. Establishing consistent, enforced support timelines remains an unresolved industry practice.

Attackers can sometimes convince phone carriers to transfer a victim's number to a new device, bypassing two-factor authentication tied to that number. Carriers have improved verification, but this attack method remains an ongoing security gap.

Fraudsters can use AI to generate entirely fake but convincing identities, complete with fabricated financial histories, to open accounts and commit fraud at scale. Detecting these synthetic identities before damage occurs remains a growing, unresolved challenge for financial institutions.

Insurance companies increasingly use AI to assess claims, but there's limited independent, scalable auditing to ensure these systems aren't unfairly denying or delaying valid claims. Building trustworthy oversight for this remains an unresolved regulatory and technical challenge.

Pirated or counterfeit software remains a common vector for malware distribution, and current detection and prevention methods haven't fully closed this persistent security gap. This continues to put both individual users and organizations at unnecessary risk.

Voice and text-based interfaces for controlling software are improving, but ensuring they interpret complex commands accurately and safely, without unintended consequences, remains unresolved. This limits how much control can be safely handed over to natural language alone.

Many critical systems, including in banking and government, still run on decades-old code that few current developers understand, and automated modernization tools remain unreliable for anything but simple cases. This leaves critical infrastructure dependent on shrinking expertise.

Low-code and no-code platforms have made software creation more accessible, but users without security expertise can still inadvertently build applications with serious vulnerabilities. Making these tools both accessible and inherently safe remains an unresolved design challenge.

Automatically applying every software update reduces security risk but occasionally introduces new bugs or incompatibilities, while manual review introduces dangerous delays. Balancing these risks reliably remains an unresolved operational challenge.

Techniques that let multiple parties jointly compute something without revealing their private data to each other exist, but they remain too slow and complex for widespread practical adoption. Making this both secure and fast enough remains an active research challenge.

People increasingly turn to AI chatbots for guidance on legal or financial questions, but these systems can provide plausible-sounding yet incorrect advice with no clear warning of their limitations. Better safeguards around this kind of high-stakes advice remain underdeveloped.

Companies increasingly build products using AI models developed by others, but there's no consistent, scalable way to verify those models are safe and reliable before integration. This creates hidden risk throughout the growing AI supply chain.

Recovering valuable materials from electronic waste is technically possible but often not profitable enough on its own to attract the investment needed to handle the sheer volume being generated. Making this economically viable at scale remains unresolved.

Consumer wearables can track things like heart rate and sleep, but their accuracy still falls short of clinical medical equipment for many important health metrics. Closing this accuracy gap remains an ongoing hardware and software challenge.