I've recently had a number of calls from recruiters about new startups in the UK in the AI space, some of them local and some of them extensions of US companies. Some of them were clearly less speculative (tracking shipping and footfall for hedge funds) while others were certainly more speculative sounding. The increase of the latter gives me the impression that there is a bit of speculation going on at the moment.
A lot of this is because there is a somewhat mis-informed (which we will be polite and not call 'gullible') class of investors out there, primarily in the VC world, that thinks that most AI is magic pixie dust and so 'we will use AI/DL' and 'we will do it on the blockchain' has become the most recent version of 'we will do it on the web' in terms of helping get funding. Most of these ventures will flame out in 6-12 months and the consequences of this are going to be the source of the upcoming AI winter OP was talking about.
The current difference is that the technologies are actually useful right now. It's not about promised or expected technologies of tomorrow, but about what we have already researched, about known capabilities that need implementation, adoption, and lots of development work to apply it in lots and lots of particular use cases. If the core research hits a dead end tomorrow and stops producing any meaningful progress for the next 10 or 20 years, the obvious applications of neural-networks-as-we're-teaching-them-in-2018 work sufficiently well and are useful enough to deploy them in all kinds of industrial applications, and the demand is sufficient to employ every current ML practitioner and student even in absence of basic research funding, so a slump is not plausible.