How mentorAI Integrates with OpenAI: A Guide to Model Options and Deployment Flexibility

Introduction

At ibl.ai, our mission is to deliver future-proof, faculty-led AI solutions for education—giving universities full ownership over their code, data, and AI strategy. One of the ways we achieve this is through mentorAI’s model-agnostic design: clients can easily integrate any Large Language Model (LLM) of their choosing, including OpenAI’s powerful model suite. In this article, we’ll walk through:

• How mentorAI integrates with OpenAI models

• The OpenAI models currently available

• How institutions can deploy and govern these models within their own infrastructure

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mentorAI’s OpenAI Integration

mentorAI is built on an extensible, API-first backend with pluggable LLM support. This means OpenAI models can be used natively within mentorAI through a simple API key configuration—no additional engineering work required. Clients have two integration options:

• Direct API Integration: Clients provide their OpenAI API key, and mentorAI orchestrates requests based on usage (no data stored by ibl.ai we offer to save chat histories and detailed analytics for our clients, but can also opt out of any storage).

• Private Deployment: For added security, institutions can deploy OpenAI models privately using Azure OpenAI Service or a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) configuration.

Because mentorAI handles routing, moderation, and session control at the platform level, universities retain full control over how models are used, monitored, and moderated—ensuring alignment with academic standards and ethical AI usage policies.

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OpenAI Model Options for mentorAI

The mentorAI platform plugs into OpenAI through a lightweight “bring-your-own-key” connector: you drop an API key (or Azure deployment name) into mentorAI’s admin console and the orchestrator immediately exposes that model to every AI Mentor you create. Because routing, safety filters, and logging live in mentorAI’s middleware, universities decide which model powers which course, whether requests stay inside their own cloud (via Azure OpenAI), and how prompts are moderated or archived for compliance.

GPT-4o (“omni”)

OpenAI’s current flagship handles text, images, and audio in a single network, responding in ~300 ms and costing 50 % less than GPT-4 Turbo. It matches GPT-4 Turbo on English/code reasoning while expanding to multilingual, vision, and real-time voice—ideal for multimodal lab assistants or spoken-language tutoring inside mentorAI.

GPT-4 Turbo

This long-context workhorse (128 k tokens) is three times cheaper for inputs than GPT-4 and still excels at structured, citation-rich answers—perfect for essay feedback or policy-heavy Q&A bots.

GPT-3.5 Turbo (latest “0125” series)

With a 16 k window, faster latency, and prices under $0.002 per 1k tokens, GPT-3.5 Turbo powers high-volume mentors such as first-year writing or career-services chat, where cost matters more than deep reasoning.

GPT-4.1 (research preview)

OpenAI’s experimental long-context variant scales to 1 million tokens and beats GPT-4o on retrieval tasks—useful for institution-scale knowledge bases once the model graduates from preview.

o4-mini & o3

Released in April 2025, these smaller models trade some depth for speed and tool-calling skills; mentorAI can route lightweight tasks (e.g., syllabus parsing or rubric generation) to o4-mini to save budget without leaving the OpenAI ecosystem.

Embedding models: text-embedding-3-small & 3-large

These vectors power retrieval-augmented generation inside mentorAI’s knowledge layer; the new series delivers up to 75 % quality gains over *ada-002* while costing 5–10× less, making large document libraries affordable.

Whisper v3 (speech-to-text)

Open-sourced and battle-tested on 680 k hours of audio, Whisper feeds real-time transcriptions into GPT-4o for spoken tutoring or accessibility features in lecture recordings.

DALL·E 3 (image generation)

Although mentorAI focuses on text, the same key unlocks DALL·E 3 for faculty who want AI to illustrate lab manuals, slide decks, or marketing assets.

Moderation & Safety models (text-moderation-007)

Every mentorAI request can be pre-filtered or post-checked with OpenAI’s latest policy model, keeping interactions inside institutional guardrails.

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Putting it all together in mentorAI

1. One switch, many models. Administrators map each course or agent to GPT-o3, GPT o4-mini, GPT o4-high, or any future OpenAI release such as GPT 4.5 without re-deploying code. 2. Private or public endpoints. Institutions start with a public key, then migrate to Azure OpenAI, GCP, or AWS for FERPA/HIPAA boundaries—mentorAI’s API URLs stay the same. 3. Cost governance. mentorAI’s dashboard shows per-mentor token spend, making it easy to route high-volume chats to economical models and reserve GPT o3/o4-mini-class reasoning for critical tasks. 4. Future-proofing. When OpenAI ships new capabilities—long-context GPT-4.1, faster o-series, or fresh embedding models—mentorAI picks them up through an alias switch, so faculty never wait on vendor road-maps.

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Deployment Flexibility

Whether an institution prefers to use OpenAI’s public endpoints or set up a private model hosting environment, mentorAI is designed to seamlessly support either pathway. Regardless of the deployment model, ibl.ai never stores institutional data, ensuring data privacy, compliance, and ownership remain in the client’s hands.

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Why This Matters for Universities

Choosing the right model and deployment method isn’t just a technical decision—it’s a strategic one. With mentorAI, universities can:

• Start fast with public OpenAI models, then migrate to private deployments when needed.

• Control AI behavior using mentorAI’s platform-layer prompts, moderation rules, and session management.

• Future-proof their strategy by easily swapping models without changing their backend or retraining their staff.

Whether you're piloting a new AI tutoring program or rolling out university-wide student support initiatives, mentorAI makes OpenAI integration secure, flexible, and aligned with your institutional goals.

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Learn More

Ready to explore how your university can deploy OpenAI models through mentorAI? Visit mentorAI by ibl.ai or contact us today to discuss your AI roadmap.