Which did you try? Many of these models don't work well at all for queries like "please do this task for me". But then people fine tune them and they work much better.

Give zephyr a try (available in ollama and similar places)

It's a fine tune of mistral and works quite well.

But as you point out, these models have less general knowledge compared to their massive siblings. Knowledge based queries are going to be lower quality than using gpt-4.