Um. This looks like a request for scary stories. As in, like, "Let's all sit in the dark with only the weak light coming from our computer screens and tell each other scary tales about how a big bad AI can eat us".
Without any specified constraints you are basically asking for horror sci-fi short stories and if that's what you want you should just say so.
If you actually want analysis, you need to start with at least a couple of pages describing the level of technology that you assume (both available and within easy reach), AI requirements (e.g. in terms of energy and computing substrate), its motivations (malevolent, wary, naive, etc.) and such.
Otherwise it's just an underpants gnomes kind of a story.
Yeah.
I propose we write vintage stories instead:
It's 1920, and the AI earns money by doing arithmetic over the phone. No human computer - not even one with a slide rule! - can ever compete with the AI, and so it ends up doing all the financial calculations for big companies, taking over the world.
This 1920s AI takes over the world the exact same way how OP's chemistry-simulating AI example does (or the AI from any other such scary story).
By doing something that would be enabled by underlying technologies behind the AI, without the need for any AI.
Far e...
Any scenario where advanced AI takes over the world requires some mechanism for an AI to leverage its position as ethereal resident of a computer somewhere into command over a lot of physical resources.
One classic story of how this could happen, from Eliezer:
You can do a lot of reasoning about AI takeover without any particular picture of how the world gets taken over. Nonetheless it would be nice to have an understanding of these possible routes. For preparation purposes, and also because a concrete, plausible pictures of doom are probably more motivating grounds for concern than abstract arguments.
So MIRI is interested in making a better list of possible concrete routes to AI taking over the world. And for this, we ask your assistance.
What are some other concrete AI takeover mechanisms? If an AI did not have a solution to the protein folding problem, and a DNA synthesis lab to write off to, what else might it do?
We would like suggestions that take an AI from being on an internet-connected computer to controlling substantial physical resources, or having substantial manufacturing ability.
We would especially like suggestions which are plausible given technology that normal scientists would expect in the next 15 years. So limited involvement of advanced nanotechnology and quantum computers would be appreciated.
We welcome partial suggestions, e.g. 'you can take control of a self-driving car from the internet - probably that could be useful in some schemes'.
Thank you!