How to Use DeepSeek with the Fracture Overlay on Mac
DeepSeek's models (DeepSeek V3, R1) shocked the AI industry in early 2026 by matching frontier closed-source quality at a fraction of the inference cost. The web chat at chat.deepseek.com and the mobile app are the consumer-facing surfaces. Pointing the Fracture overlay at DeepSeek gives you frontier-class AI for free.
DeepSeek's flagship V3 (Dec 2024) and R1 (Jan 2025) put it on par with GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for most tasks at a fraction of the inference cost. The free tier in 2026 is more generous than ChatGPT's. Code performance is particularly strong - DeepSeek Coder is one of the top open models. Be aware that DeepSeek hosts in China; for some students that's a privacy concern (similar concerns exist for any cloud AI). For full privacy, run DeepSeek's open-weight Coder 6.7B locally via Ollama.
For non-sensitive content, fine. For confidential research, the China-hosted servers may be a policy issue at some universities. Run locally via Ollama if it matters.
On most benchmarks (2026): roughly equal on general tasks, better on code, slightly weaker on creative writing.
Yes - `ollama pull deepseek-coder` for the code-specialist 6.7B model. Full V3 and R1 are too large for consumer Macs.
Need reference access during your exam?
Fracture runs a native floating overlay that sets the macOS window privacy flag. It is 100% excluded from screen capture feeds, window lists, and proctor recordings.