On the eve of the AI revolution, Google had strayed far from its roots. No longer a scrappy startup, it increasingly prized share price over innovation, its motto “Don’t be Evil” all but abandoned.

Then, within hours of ChatGPT’s 2022 launch, tech insiders were openly proclaiming the company’s death. Especially galling for Google employees was that they had invented the underlying technology and created their own chatbot far earlier, only for executives to waffle and quash it. Twenty years after Larry Page noted that “artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,” the company was caught completely off guard. Once synonymous with inventiveness, Google had become a sclerotic, self-serving bureaucracy and squandered its commanding lead in AI.

With unparalleled insider access within the company, Google on the Brink charts the full story of Google’s engagement with AI: recruiting top scientists such as Geoffrey Hinton, acquiring Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind and developing driverless Waymo cars. We see Page and co-founder Sergey Brin hand control to CEO Sundar Pichai, and tensions mount between old Google and new. As the company competes with Microsoft and OpenAI over the future of artificial intelligence and cozies up to President Trump and the military, it faces an internal battle for its soul. Ultimately, it would take Brin’s return— and the risk-taking and engineering brilliance of the early Google—to keep the company a contender in the race to superintelligence.