Trying to monetize the piracy of your users. That’s a bold business strategy.

Some time ago, never mind how long precisely, Plex were trying to legitimise themselves, by adding streaming from official sources, etc.

I would be curious if this is meant to be a deterrent, or just to look like one by making piracy expensive, so they can eat their cake and have it too.

I can’t imagine self hosting an LLM-based search engine would be too viable. The hardware demands, even for a relatively small quantised model, are considerable. Doubly so if you don’t have a GPU to accelerate with.