(CNN) Without artificial intelligence there wouldn't be much left of Facebook as we know it today.

That's according to Yann LeCun, who founded Facebook's artificial intelligence research lab five years ago.

"If you take the deep learning out of Facebook today, Facebook's dust," LeCun, Facebook's chief AI scientist, recently told CNN Business. "It's entirely built around it now."

The technology is included in everything from the posts and translations you see in your news feed to advertisements.

When LeCun established the lab, Facebook was already dabbling in deep learning — a type of machine learning he's worked on and championed since the 1980s. Deep-learning software, modeled after the way neurons work in the brain, ingests loads of data and learns to make its own predictions.

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