Allen Hoffman is an inventor and creator. Where he sees a problem, he invents a solution. 

He is also a born entrepreneur. His senior year of college, he wasn't happy with his dry herb vaporizer, so he developed a novel heating element design and brought that design insight to DaVinci, leading to the development of the DaVinci IQ Vaporizer. Allen was the Director of Product Development at Airo Brands for four years and is currently the Director of Research and Development there. Most recently, he founded Rooted Intellect, the parent company of the product, The Bloom Carousel, and its accompanying revolutionary AI platform, ‘Phraistus’.

Phraistus is Born

Allen lives in Colorado and suffers from sciatica and long-haul Covid. Like many cannabis patients, Allen realized that the best way for him to obtain his cannabis medicine was to grow his own. He began researching online in discussion forums and discovered he was not receiving answers to his questions about growing cannabis. Allen started getting involved with ChatGPT at the beginning of 2023 and was granted research grants and preview access to advanced models. 

“When I started my grow, I went around looking for answers, and my posts got downvoted, not answered. I saw other people's posts not get answered or the questions get denigrated, and so I was left with a need to find answers.” Allen said.

He started working with one of the advanced AI models that he had access to. After much discussion to get it to accept that his home grow was indeed legal as a medical patient in Colorado, the AI agreed to answer Allen’s questions, and it answered all of his questions. It helped him get through a bug infestation and a rust mold epidemic. It helped him figure out when to flip the plant and how to deal with it. It helped him diagnose soil chemistry problems he was running into. 

At the same time, Allen was active in the OpenAI Discord community where he met Dark Angel, who is the architect of a software layer called Arcturus, which houses Allen’s AI program, named “Phraistus,” 

Phraistus is a curated AI model for horticultural endeavors, currently in alpha testing on Discord. The name for Phriastus comes from the Greek Father of Botany, Theophrastus. Dark Angel and Allen, AKA Nerdyburner, began working together on Discord, testing and tuning the AI model, building it up, and adding new features over time. It occurred to Allen that if they could provide this AI access to everyone, it could be a hugely beneficial tool so they built it with the intention of free access. 

Allen had some other help along the way with beta testing of the program. One of his heaviest users of the program, known as Groqs, used it to help his plants recover from some bad advice he was given on Reddit, and has since become a moderator for Phraistus. Phraistus has been able to answer over 1000 questions and growing, with AI advanced learning capabilities that can answer questions based on context image recognition. For instance, you could feed a photograph of your plant to Phraistus and it would be able to diagnose problems and help you solve them.

“You can ask literally any question related to biology, horticulture, and cultivation of cannabis and it provides impartial advice, without bias, without judgment,” Allen said. “It won’t help you grow contraband plants, so no peyote, but everything that's legal, it's got you. Answers on soil chemistry, top dressings, foliar sprays, team hydroponics, trimming sites and methods, diagnosing issues, and image recognition are where it really shines. It can diagnose things like mold from just images of leaves.”

He finds the impartiality of the program particularly beneficial because there's no human gatekeeping of information related to cannabis. “I believe this is why I was banned temporarily from some subreddits for sharing the outputs generated by Phraistus. The message was clear: do not share AI outputs in our subreddit” Allen said.

As he watched questions continue to go unanswered, he set up the subreddit r/rootedintellect with information about the company and directions where to find the AI service on Discord. "Every question deserves an answer."

Necessity Is the Mother of Invention: Bloom Carousel

As Allen experimented with growing his own herb, he experienced some unanticipated physical challenges as well. “As I dealt with bugs and mold, some things had to be dealt with leaf by leaf sometimes all the way back to the tent. I realized because the nets were locked into the tent, there was no way to turn the plant around if I had a rotating stand to sit it on. I bought some of those trying to fix a problem, and that worked until I trellised the plant. So, okay, I need the trellis to rotate too. And I'm a product developer. I'm an inventor. I write patents. So I began to think about an invention that would suffice.” 

A new concept was born: the Bloom Carousel. 

“Invention starts with blank paper, colored pencils, and some templates,” Allen said. “I think about the challenge that has to be solved. And it came down to: how do you get to the back of the plant? It started with a rotating table. Then I added a trellis frame that locked to the table. The trellis not only spins with the table, but it provides a means to spin the table, which is important if you're stuck in a wheelchair. I over-engineered the tar out of it because a plant weighs 60 or so pounds when it's fully grown.”

“The bearing that holds the table is engineered to hold three or four times that weight,” Allen continued. “250 to 300 lbs, so if you have to lean on it briefly it's not going to collapse. Same thing with the frame. It's made of steel rather than aluminum which is slightly heavier, but it's also a lot more durable.”

Allen added a telescoping frame with notches every two inches so it can collapse all the way down to 38 inches and pull it all the way out to 50-inch increments for added flexibility. The lazy Susan base was placed on locking casters so that it could be rolled around.  

If you have several of them in a bigger grow tent you can move them around to get to the ones in the back of the tent. Same situation if you have a greenhouse or breeding room. One of my testers already rolled one from his bedroom to his flower room and he said ‘I trimmed the plant without killing my back.’ Product is about answering a specific need. I needed to get to the back of the plant without killing my back.”

The Future of Rooted Intellect 

There are even more incredible inventions coming from Rooted Intellect. Plans are in the works with King Solomon Advanced Crop Nutrition to provide total chemical transparency that can be fed into the AI model with an image of the plant with a feed card to diagnose problems. 

“If you provide that information with a soil slurry test and the pH assessment and some other information, then it rules out a lot of issues and can very quickly deterministically figure out what actually happened using that package of information"

Rooted Intellect is also designing a growth system with a full sensor suite that assesses the soil chemistry, water chemistry, and lights. The Bloom Carousel was designed as the flagship product. Containing no electronic components allows it to fit the design requirements and be relatively inexpensive to design and build. Its low price point of $99.99 enables many consumers to add this piece of technology to their grow efforts. The Kickstarter campaign, going live on 2.23.24, will empower a mass production run, the profits of which will empower the development of the rest of the technology portfolio.

Rooted Intellect wants to revolutionize agriculture. Automated food production is not a new concept. Creating AI tools and low-cost growing suites to help consumers grow their own cannabis and food is revolutionary. These products will have the capability to drive automation of biological production to such a low cost, that it could end world food scarcity. 

“If everyone is growing their own, it starts to flip the economics of selling food.” Allen said. 

When I asked Allen if he had any advice for aspiring innovators passionate about making a difference in agriculture through technology, he paused thoughtfully, and said, “Invention is a windy road and it has solved nearly every problem that has been demanded of technology. There's a continuous curve of advancement as we continue to solve the challenges that are in front of us and agriculture is a big one. There are literally people starving. The only way we're going to solve that challenge is through the development and implementation of good technologies. If people have good ideas, they should continue development. Even if they're not funded, even if they don't have a go-to-market strategy, that doesn't matter, because while some technologies aren't commercialized, they're still important. You never know when a good idea is going to change the world.”