If you watch your graphs you will see the AI focus everything on research from time to time. Same goes for industrial production.
You could do the same thing, and achieve the same result.
The thing is, we human players tend to set our sliders and then forget about it for a long while. But the AI sometimes will change those settings every turn or two, depending on what they want in the near term.
Try it sometime. Set both production and research values to 100% (so social and military spending are at 0%) and see how quickly you can research a tech. If you have several factories and labs, you might research 1 or more techs (along the same branch, of course) every turn.
