Thanks @dejanbatanjac. I can confirm that the problem I am having installing 1.3 are just because my environment is somehow not compatible. On a fresh conda environment there is no issue. The environment I want to use it with has dependencies due to using Open AI Gym and Unity Agent - this article points out that Unity requires “CUDA Toolkit 9.0, cuDNN v7.0. THEY MUST BE THE EXACT VERSIONS TENSORFLOW REQUIRES OR WILL NOT WORK” (the article’s emphasis).
I think my issues are either with these requirements or with the tensorflow itself - not sure as I really can’t understand those conda errors - its not useful for me if I have to uninstall these various components of my reinforcement learning environment to get Pytorch 1.3 working.