The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that DeepSeek has shortened the timeline for artificial intelligence's economic impact with a new model that rivals the best globally, costing only $5.6-million (U.S.) to train -- about one-tenth of previous estimates. The Globe's guest columnist Joel Blit writes that they have also made it open-source, making the technology accessible to anyone. The AI race is no longer confined to a handful of deep-pocketed players such as OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. The barriers to entry are crumbling, and control over AI models is slipping away from the few companies that hoped to monopolize them. If you assumed AI's value would be captured primarily by model developers, DeepSeek's success suggests otherwise. History shows that the biggest winners from disruptive technology are often not its creators. While early infrastructure companies like Cisco and Nortel profited, the real wealth went to innovators like Amazon, Google, Meta and Netflix, who transformed entire industries and became the world's most valuable companies. AI's economic impact will stem from how businesses apply it, as shown by open-source models like DeepSeek-V3 and Meta's Llama, rather than who builds the models.