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Jordan -- good question; it's something I've also been wondering about. (I've also invested quite a bit of time in drafting an essay submission for this AI Worldview Prize contest.)
A stopgap solution might be for alternative funders to offer a somewhat larger number of smaller prizes. The original $1.5 million prize was contingent on inducing a very large shift in timelines and/or risk estimates among AI safety experts, and that always seemed quite unlikely to happen. The smaller prizes seemed more likely to actually be awarded, and served as more realistic incentives for writing great, incisive, compelling essays.
So, my humble suggestion would be for any other funders who want to continue this essay competition, to offer something like $250k for first place essay, $150k for second place, $100k for third place, and something like 10 'honorable mention' prizes of $50k each. This would still be significant incentive for people who were already working on essays to complete them and release them. And it would represent a more predictable budgetary cost (e.g. $1 million total) to whoever might step in to fund the competition.
Good question, I've created a manifold market for this:
Thank you! This is very useful input.