AI Providers Explained

An AI provider is your organization's account with an AI service: where it is, and the key that pays for it. Kamo keeps a registry of every provider you connect, every model each one offers, and exactly what each model can do.

Providers, models and capabilities

• A provider is the account: its type, its address and its key. Keys are stored encrypted, and once you save one Kamo never shows it in full again.
• A model is one of the provider's AI models. Kamo lists them for you by asking the provider, and you can add one by hand.
• A capability is something a model can do: generate text, read images, call tools, return structured output, create embeddings, transcribe speech, speak, translate and more. Each capability can carry details, such as the languages a translation model supports or the size of an embedding.

Where the facts come from

Each capability shows its source. Reported by the provider means the service said so itself; Kamo's model catalogue means Kamo knows that model; Guessed from the name means Kamo guessed from the model's name; Found by a check means a verification measured it; Set by an administrator means someone in your organization set it; Set by Kamo marks Kamo's own services. A guess is never trusted blindly: it stays unverified until it is checked.

Verification

Verify runs a small real request against the model: a short message, a tiny image, a tool call, one embedding. The capability becomes Verified when it works, and Check failed, with the reason, when it does not. AI members only use verified capabilities, so an unproven model is never handed work it cannot do.

Provided by Kamo

Kamo runs some AI services of its own inside its cluster, such as embeddings, reranking, translation, text recognition (OCR) and a local language model. Your data never leaves Kamo, so they are safe for PHI, and they need no key of your own. They are switched on for every organization, and you can switch any of them off under Provided by Kamo.

Priority order

When a request does not name a model, Kamo tries your providers from the top of the list and moves down when one is unavailable. That is what makes more than one provider resilient rather than just redundant.

Health

Kamo checks every provider regularly. A provider whose key stops working is marked Key rejected and is skipped until the key is fixed; nothing is switched off behind your back.