What creative transformation has that company done? It seems to me rather that the LLM is an entirely mechanical process with no creativity.

No more creative than what my ISP does when it conveys data from one machine to another.

We don’t allow the ISP to claim copyright in the data that it mechanically transforms. I don’t see why the company running an LLM would have any stronger claim of copyright in the output.

Copyright grounds its justification in the creative expression of people. By creative transformation, new works can be created and some of those are deemed not restricted by copyright in the earlier work.

An LLM is not a person. An LLM has no mind and no creative expression. The training of an LLM and the inference from the LLM are, by definition, non-creative mechanical transformation from the input training data.

The copyright of the input work should, by this logic, survive whole in the output from that mechanical non-creative process. That is substantially different from the process by which humans learn and create.

I’m wondering about corporate level without having on-premise resources.

You’re necessarily, then, talking about paying for some other party to host resources at some other location(s). So the corporation needs to shop around for a deal for hosting web services.

Assuming the matter of hosting is taken care of, then, which service to run? In order to not be locked in to some proprietary provider, I would strongly recommend free-software community-maintained forge software. Something like Forgejo or Sourcehut.

An LLM, being a large database derived mechanically from its training data, seems to meet the definition of “derived work” as exists in most copyright legislation.

The output from an LLM, through the inference process, is also mechanically derived from that training data.

Lawmakers might try writing exceptions to please a stock market absolutely baying for hyperscaler growth. Despite that, it seems entirely viable that the copyright, held by humans on the training data fed to the LLM, continue to hold in the output derived from that input.

People saying it’s “obvious the output has no copyright”, or people who act as though it’s all free from any claim by the humans who wrote the works used as training data, are just showing their ignorance, it seems to me.