  Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT/GPT-4, have proven to be
powerful tools in promoting the user experience as an AI assistant. The
continuous works are proposing multi-modal large language models (MLLM),
empowering LLMs with the ability to sense multiple modality inputs through
constructing a joint semantic space (e.g. visual-text space). Though
significant success was achieved in LLMs and MLLMs, exploring LLMs and MLLMs in
domain-specific applications that required domain-specific knowledge and
expertise has been less conducted, especially for \textbf{marine domain}.
Different from general-purpose MLLMs, the marine-specific MLLM is required to
yield much more \textbf{sensitive}, \textbf{informative}, and
\textbf{scientific} responses. In this work, we demonstrate that the existing
MLLMs optimized on huge amounts of readily available general-purpose training
data show a minimal ability to understand domain-specific intents and then
generate informative and satisfactory responses. To address these issues, we
propose \textbf{MarineGPT}, the first vision-language model specially designed
for the marine domain, unlocking the secrets of the ocean to the public. We
present our \textbf{Marine-5M} dataset with more than 5 million marine
image-text pairs to inject domain-specific marine knowledge into our model and
achieve better marine vision and language alignment. Our MarineGPT not only
pushes the boundaries of marine understanding to the general public but also
offers a standard protocol for adapting a general-purpose assistant to
downstream domain-specific experts. We pave the way for a wide range of marine
applications while setting valuable data and pre-trained models for future
research in both academic and industrial communities.
