Any Advice for what Industry is looking for in ML PhDs? [D]

I'm a first year ML PhD at a T5 ML program in the US. I managed to get a first author paper accepted to NeurIPS Main Track last month and thought I'd start applying for PhD research internships since I saw a lot of them required a "top" venue publication.

But I've just been getting rejections (Nvidia, Waymo etc) and I also even got rejected from the Citadel NeurIPS travel grant.

Now, I'd say my area of research isn't super "hype", it's still a well known area but not within the LLM / Agentic / VLA / Multimodal / Robotics / Foundation model kind of work that a lot of Industry is in right now. But I do have the knowledge for areas in Vision / General Deep Learning, it's just the aforementioned areas are not what I'm focusing on for PhD.

So I was wondering, what exactly is Industry looking for in interns? How do you navigate companies that would be friendly to 1st years if it is a year problem? (Work exp wise, I've also worked as a SWE intern for multiple FAANG companies in ugrad)